The Article Distribution Service iSnare.com has been billed as one of the best tools around to increase a website’s presence. And I’ve been a big proponent of it since I first came across the service.
The idea is simple enough: submit an article to this service, it is reviewed by humans for quality and then gets auto-distributed to 1000s of article-aggregation websites, many on general topics, and a few on whatever topic you choose for your article.
After using it a few times, I began to notice that pages I promoted with the service would tend to rise in Google’s SERPs for my targeted terms, and then slowly fall back down. They would usually settle at higher positions than where they started, but I wondered why the Rome effect was so strong (that was a subtle reference to a rise/fall timeline).
So, I decided to study the Google results on fresh articles, and their mentions in search engines. I used the old trick of searching a unique phrase. On August 4th I used a unique phrase from each article on Google’s engine: 0 results. I then submitted both articles to iSnare for distribution. On August 8th I got an email that both articles had been approved and syndicated; a second Google search revealed 0 results for both.
0 results again on Aug. 9th. Then on Aug. 10th I saw the first signs of life: 7 results for Article 1 and 8 results for Article 2. By Aug. 15th, Article 1 had 437 results, and Article 2 had 458 results. There are two points of note here:
Point 1: I submitted both articles under the same category. They were approximately the same length (around 450 words). I submitted them on the same within minutes of each other, and yet Article 1 lagged behind Article 2 for some reason.
Point 2: At this point (Aug. 15th) there were no supplemental results for either article. All 400+ results were fully viewable in the main index.
On the 16th of August the dupe filter must have kicked in on Article 1, because supplementals appeared and total results dropped to 361. Article 2 continued to thrive with 556 results on the 16th, with still no supplementals showing.
Eventually the dupe filter must’ve kicked in on Article 2 as well, and by August 30th, both result counts were below 50 (39 and 34 for 1 & 2, respectively).
As of today, Big G shows 11 results, of a total of 16 for Article 1 (so, approx. 4 supplementals). Article 2 fared better in the end, today displaying 16 results of 22 total (so, approx. 6 supplementals).
The [recently exported] PageRank for the top 10 results on each article range from 0-2, with the majority being 0 (and 2 N/As!).
So now some theories:
1. Article 1’s target phrase was more competitive than Article 2’s. My theory is that the more competitive an area, the greater number of filters (or in some cases, reviews) a page must pass to become part of the index. This is explained best in the theory of long-tail keywords, where phrases that don’t mean much in a marketing sense have a lot of impact on John Q. Searcher.
2. To compete with social bookmarking, Google needs to be buzz-aware. When a site creates a certain amount of buzz (linking, textual-references, etc.) Google needs to get in there and evaluate it for ranking. It will weight these sites with additional trustrank to get on top of the coming wave. A second (and potentially third) filter will later decide if the page is worth keeping in the index. Possibly by analyzing search volume for a phrase vs. the amount of “buzz”.
What might a takeaway be from this experiment? In my case, the combination of the “buzz” created with the article distro, plus the already-established authority (or Trustrank) of the site was enough to put the [brand new] pages I was targeting into the top 10 for their intended keyphrase.
As with most SEO activities, it is recommended to use this tool appropriately, and in combination with other tools.
Any thoughts?
Update: Looks like Aaron Wall and I may have been thinking along some similar lines. He just posted about new domains getting ranked in Google over old sites, and mentioned the following:
“Also think of the search business model as though you are a search engine. To them, being the first person to do something is a sign of quality because to be the first person in a market requires some market timing / knowledge / investment / luck.”
“Catch a wave” theory, explained in financial terminology.
I was reading a thread about meta tags on the DigitalPoint forums today.
.NET magazine wrote an article on SEO recently and stated that meta tags no longer matter for search engine optimization. Were they correct to do so?
The SEO industry is in state where most of the mechanical aspects of optimization can be handled by a competent web designer who stays on top of the basics (.htaccess, robots.txt, static URLs), which is why we see so many design firms now touting that they can perform SEO while designing a site.
So that takes care of the ’search engine’ part of SEO. But what about optimization?
Search engines (specifically Google) still use meta tags, but not to rank your site. At least not directly.
Let’s start with three statements:
Fact 1: Google has access to your meta- title and description tags.
Fact 2: Google will display your title and description tags in search results, unless the engine feels that writing its own description from your text, or using your DMOZ entry is more relevant (algorithmically determined, happens less than 20% of the time in my experience).
Fact 3: Google will rearrange its search results by click through rate and other (measurable) factors to provide he most relevant results to users.
You may wish to debate fact #3, but for now let’s assume it’s true in this world.
The acceptance of these three facts means that you need to write a title and description that will impress visitors and increase your click through rate. A better visitor experience will push your site higher in the rankings.
So how do you write a good title and description? Well, that means it’s time to take a page from the PPC-world…