Article Marketing: Fox in the Competitor Hen House or Chicken Little?
I recently was asked by an author to remove a free content
article from a client web site where we had posted it (with
several others from different authors) to increase topical
relevancy at a site that fit the article perfectly.
This article was submitted to free web content list archives
which I’d found online. A search turned up dozens of
additional uses across the web. I began to believe that this
author simply didn’t like the site that used the article and
was seeking removal to avoid competition. We took it down to
avoid an unnecessary battle over something we didn’t wish to
fight about.
The site we used it on did compete with this person, but the
client site has more to lose than the author, because readers
could click through to the author site from the resource box
link and gain the customer instead of the client. Having YOUR
article on competitors sites is an incredible marketing coup!
You should be glad anytime this happens as long as they follow
your use restrictions and provide live links from the resource
box at the end of your articles. The client wisely saw topical
web content for their site more valuable than the concern of
that external link to the author/competitor.
It does immeasurable good for your link popularity as well
since that link comes from a relevant and on-topic site,
rather than from a useless links directory. Your articles
serve as 500 to 1200 word advertisements for your business and
if it appears on competitor sites, it is as if you have been
able to sneak in the back door and steal customers from the
competing site via your article. Would you rather appear in a
random list of links, or have 1000 words to convince people to
buy your products or services?
All of this just baffles me as a content distributor. All of
those authors that requested removal would gain a valuable
one-way inbound link to their websites from topical and
relevant content that increases their link popularity and
their visibility.
Why on earth would they want those articles, that notoriety,
that credibility and the high quality links removed? When
there is no copyright issue present, you gain far more from
use of your article than you lose by having an article on
sites you don’t like.
I’ve got articles lose in the world that I’m not proud of,
simply because I’ve become a better writer since I distributed
them originally. Several are outdated and recommend things
that are no longer valid or, in some cases, not at all useful
for current standards in search engine ranking - but that is
because the search engine algorithms have changed and best
practices have changed.
That is why I now date my article copyright to clearly show
the date associated with the article. But I would NEVER
request removal of my articles from sites that have old
articles posted. They will STILL be more relevant and valuable
to me than any cluttered, off-topic reciprocal links
directory, because they are a link within relevant text that
gain link popularity and sometimes lead to new clients and
further visibility.
Removal of your articles from compeitor sites would be silly
in most cases and will reduce your visibility and your link
popularity. Be the Fox in the Competitor Hen House instead
of Chicken Little in fear of the article marketing sky falling.
Copyright © August 10, 2005
Mike Banks Valentine operates http://Publish101.com
Free Web Content Distribution for Article Marketers and
Provides content aggregation, press release optimization
Custom web content for Search Engine Positioning
http://www.seoptimism.com/SEO_Contact.htm
Learn at http://WebSite101.com Ecommerce Tutorial
Monitor Your Visibility in Google, MSN, and Yahoo with these DIY SEO Tools
This is the second part of an article series in which you’ll find many tools that you can use to monitor your site’s search engine position and see how your do-it-yourself search engine optimization efforts are coming along.
The following tools are for monitoring your search results in the three major search engines. It isn’t an all-inclusive list, but rather a highlight of some of the tools you can use. (I’ll point you to one of the master lists when we get into more general tools in part three.)
Using Your Google Site Information Page
I’ve covered this in an earlier article, but just in case you missed it, we’ll go over it again briefly here. (If you need more help following along, you can listen to one of my recent podcasts for a convenient audio walkthrough.)
Open up your browser and go to Google’s home page. Type in info:yoursitenameandsuffix. So if your site was ExactSeek.com you’d type info:exactseek.com. You can also use site:yoursitenameandsuffix to find out which pages have been indexed by Google’s search engine spider.
This search will tell you pages that Google considers similar to yours. It will also show sites that it considered linked to you, and show sites that carry your full url, hyperlinked or not. It’s not 100% accurate as far as telling you all the sites that are linked back to yours, but what you can learn from this is which backlinks matter.
From here you can also see the last day Google spidered your home page.
To see this in action, click on the first group of information links, “Show Google’s cache of yoursitename.com” If you look next to the word “cached” one the first line, the date is expressed also.
Sometimes it seems that the cached time for yoursitename.com and www.yoursitename.com are different, so be sure and check both.
Finding Information About Your Site In Yahoo
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/tips/tips-08.html
This document will tell you how to find out what sites are linking to you, give you the results for how many pages of your site are in Yahoo, and more. Once you get to the results page, you’ll be able to view your cached pages, etc.
Discovering Your Site’s Status on MSN
http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx
As the page in the help section states, you can use site:www.yoursitehere.com to find out if a document at your site has been indexed. The results page will also give you the date of last caching.
Google Rankings
http://www.googlerankings.com
You’ll need a free Google API key for this one, and the site has the direct link telling you where to get one. You’ll have to enter this key in order to query the site for information on Google.
With Google Rankings, you’ll be able to see where you rank within the top 40-1000 results in Google for a given keyword. I recently noticed that it also displays results for MSN and Yahoo, with links to each search engine.
They also have some other tools that will track your keywords over time, as well as one they call the “Ultimate SEO Tool” that will measure your site’s keyword density.
Google Backlinks Checker
http://lilengine.com/tools/backlinks-tool.php
LilEngine.com’s Backlink Checker will measure the number of links you have pointing back to your site against competing sites. Handy if you just want a quick comparison of how many links you have versus others, though how much getting more links back will help varies, depending on other factors.
Yahoo Search Rankings
http://www.yahoosearchrankings.com/
From the same folks who brought you Google Rankings, using Yahoo Search Rankings, you’ll be able to see where you rank within the top 1000 results in Yahoo for a given keyword. If you just want to see your Yahoo rankings, it’s quite helpful.
You can find more Yahoo tools that use the Yahoo Web API at their developer’s site : http://developer.yahoo.net/wiki/index.cgi?ApplicationList..
In the next part of the article, we’ll take a closer look at other tools that give you more specific information about the links pointing back to your site, keyword research, and more.
Tinu is a website promotion specialist who can teach you many do-it-yourself ways to bring more traffic to your site in addition to DIY SEO. Subscribe to her ezine at http://www.freetraffictip.com/thebook/ for more details.