THIS IS STEP BY STEP SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
PAGE 40 TO 42 CHAPTER 6
• 99centarticles.com
• articleninjas.com
• articlesontap.com
• ccarticles.com
• myarticleexpress.com
There’s another service that can work well for this type of content writing called iWriter (http://www.iwriter.com). The good thing about iWriter is that you can order individual articles, set the price you wish to pay, and reject any articles that don’t meet your standards. In that way, you can be assured that you are only paying for articles that you feel are up to your criteria. If you’re short on time, it could definitely be worth giving this service a try since you have so much control over which articles to use in your SEO campaigns.
If these article-writing companies don’t meet your approval, you can also look into hiring a part-time content writer. There are a couple of sites you can use to hire a content writer on a per-project or hourly basis. The two biggest sites with the most talent available are Elance (www.elance.com) and oDesk (www.odesk.com). On these sites, you can review vendors’ past jobs and customer feedback and engage these potential content writers via e-mail or Skype before you actually hire them. Also, you’ll have the ability to set up an account with Elance or oDesk so that the contractor doesn’t get paid until the job is completed. The other nice thing about these networks is that they make it very easy to replace a contractor who isn’t meeting expectations. These services have done a great job of limiting the risk and exposure involved with hiring an inexpensive contractor for content-writing purposes.
One caveat: it’s very important that you don’t publish these articles multiple times as the search engines will penalize you for duplication. They will know. One article should equal one submission.
With this in mind, I would like to quickly cover something that is a bit controversial in the SEO world. Quite a few SEO professionals engage in a process known as article spinning, which involves taking a well-written and informative article and replacing the main content with various synonyms. Thus, the article is essentially saying the same thing while changing enough words to make the search engines view the spun version of the article as though it were a unique article.
Now, this technique is technically considered “black hat,” meaning that it is frowned upon by the major search engines. As someone writing a book on the proper way to market a website through SEO, I can’t advocate that anyone go out and engage in article spinning. However, I feel as though I do have a responsibility to mention its existence given that it is so widely used by such a large number of SEO professionals.
Article spinning is a hot-button issue in the SEO community, and there are two sides of the argument. The first is that article spinning is a bad thing for the industry and its only purpose is to spam various websites with content that is passed off as unique but isn’t. Opponents of article spinning argue that the practice does a disservice across the Internet because it floods websites with content that isn’t strong enough to get picked up on its own and shared virally. These critics also argue that it goes against Google’s guidelines, which can create problems down the line if Google ever detects that your website engages in article spinning.
The side that believes that article spinning is an acceptable practice will argue that Google’s robots aren’t sophisticated enough to determine great content from poor content and that it’s the faulty system that created the need for article spinning in the first place. After all, if Ford takes the trouble to put together a great commercial, the company will buy airtime on every major network to air it. These individuals argue that article spinning has a similar effect, maximizing the reach of great content that was so painstakingly written by the website owner.
I believe both sides have a valid argument. My intent here is not to choose a side but to simply give you as much information as possible so you can make your own informed decision about how you would like to proceed with your content distribution efforts.
Google has made quite a few changes in the past year to their algorithm, changes that appear to be designed to address this issue. While these updates connote cute furry animals with names such as Panda and Penguin, make no mistake about their purpose. For those who haven’t heard of Panda or Penguin before, these are a recent set of Google algorithm changes designed to discourage website owners from engaging in less than reputable activities to get their sites to the top of the Google search engine.
The Panda update is essentially a filter to stop sites with poor-quality content from working their way into Google’s top search results. The Penguin update was created to better catch sites that spam the Google search results, especially those sites that are buying links or obtaining them through networks designed specifically to boost search engine rankings. I have not covered these Google shifts in much detail throughout this book since all of the strategies outlined in this book are in line with the website behavior that Google is encouraging. However, given this issue’s impact on the SEO community, it makes sense to at least make you aware of it.
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