When you are starting out, choosing the right source for inbound links can be difficult to determine, especially when you have a new site and no PR.
When I started writing my first blog, one of the main ways that I used to promote it was through gaining inbound links from various other blogs using articles. I had tremendous success and still do with many of my great articles. It's a very quick and efficient way to gain the best foothold in the search marketing world because of your ability to target multiple websites with similar content with very little effort. So, very shortly after I started that first blog, that's what I did. As a result, a lot of my articles ended up on various blogs. What I noticed, though, was that a few months after I started gaining those inbound links, I started to lose them quickly. And to find out why, I had to do some investigating...
I utilized the Search Engine Marketing Reports that I offer through my business to see why it was that I was losing these links and found out that what I thought was a fundamental flaw was really a fundamental design in the search engines and blogs.
The reason that I was losing those links is due to the aging effect in the search engines. You see, most search engines spiders are designed to index only a certain distance away from the main page of your site. The idea is that the majority of your content (or the content that you want to market to your clients) will be contained on those pages. For instance, Google has been rumored to only index approximately 4 levels away from the landing page of a site.
When a blog author makes a post to their site, older posts are moved further toward the bottom until they are placed on another page of the site (or 2nd level). This continues until a post is so far away from the landing page, that it no longer will be indexed, because it's considered too old.
So when you author an article and submit it to directories, your article is posted to a number of blogs, websites, newsletters... all of them need quality content. But as time goes on and more posts are made to that particular blog, your article (and essentially, the link to your own site) moves further down the list until it is no longer is indexed by the search engines and they begin to drop it altogether in favor of the newer content.
So mystery solved... I was losing my links because the blogs were doing what they were made to do...add newer content.
So, where does this put the Search Marketer who wants to actively promote their site using free article directories? Essentially, what you do will still work (as it always has), but your marketing plan must include consistently submitting to article directories, because eventually, you will lose those inbound links.
John Wooton, who owns Inspired Designs Web Consulting is a professional Search Marketer and offers comprehensive solutions for businesses of all sizes. Sign up today for our Search Engine Marketing Reports. To read his blog, click here: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization.
