SEO and Article Marketing

You might be surprised to see us say that, but it’s true and we are going to show you why you’ll be lovin’ it too…

This was supposed to be a short post with a few screen shots and voila, all done. But it morphed into something else entirely. So please read to the end and you will get a few SEO tips we have discovered; why quality counts; and how being a part of UAW is going to make you super happy as a client; an affiliate; and as a site owner who receives content.

First, a little back story that will make you happy to be part of UAW.

We Never Truly Appreciate the Outcome of Past Decisions

Four years ago when UAW was first started, a critical decision needed to be made. Do we allow just any old articles through the system, or do we review each and every article and maintain a quality standard? It wasn’t so bad in the early days when we only had a handful of clients submitting a small number of articles. The cost and time involved was not that substantial. Not so today. Now in order to handle the system load, we need to review hundreds of thousands of articles and maintain a very large review staff which is time consuming and expensive. Plus, it also dictates that we have to turn people away or ask them to leave the system if they are not willing to maintain certain levels of professionalism.

As you can imagine, this has caused us to question our stance a few times over the years. “Should we be more lenient or stop reviewing articles all together?” And the answer was always the same – “No, quality will always win out!” Plus, as a serious internet marketer, you don’t want your quality articles being sent out side by side with scraped machine generated garbage. You want to know that everyone is being held to the same standard.

The same goes for sites which accept your articles. They don’t want garbage. They don’t want to have to sift through hundreds or thousands of crap articles to find a few nuggets. They want to know that the articles coming in have been looked at by a real person. The UAW plugins guarantee that and that is why over 20,000 site owners let us publish directly to their sites. With the attention you pay to quality and the reassurance that we are maintaining a quality system, we have earned their trust. And that is important to all of us.

And has it been worth it for our clients and our company? More so now than ever – especially now with Google coming along and saying ‘no quality – no traffic’.

 

Why We Agree With Google

Why?  Because search was getting silly again.  It was sliding back to the poor quality of the Adsense days of old with sites full of scraped unreadable content. There were systems popping up saying ‘Here’s a hole. Fill it up with as much crap as you can.’ And not just articles, but spam comments and anything else you can find.

Now it would be great to say that we were one step ahead of Google. We would like to say we saw this algorithm change coming, but that would be untrue. What we did see through a site audit at the end of last year, is that there were a number of sites that were taking content from us and putting it side by side with content of questionable quality that didn’t meet the standards. So we elected to remove them from our network – about 3000 of them. Poof, gone.

You may have noticed this with some of your submission counts as we also tightened up UAW’s category matching algorithms by doing a major overhaul to ensure that your articles get published and not just submitted. With this, you may have seen your submission numbers drop.  However the effect of your submissions remain the same as even though the submission numbers are lower, the amount accepted remains high and will climb as we increase the network size further (more about that below).

Again, we had to make a decision, just like four years ago. Do we become more lenient or maintain quality? Quality will win out – EVERY TIME – so that’s what we did.

And purely by coincidence Google comes along two months later and says the same thing, which means that decision, even though it causes some short term pain, creates long term gain for all of us.

 

Why We All Should Be Happy About the Changes

As professional internet marketers who maintain quality websites and send out quality content – you will be rewarded. It is always the case. There may be a few bumps along the way, but quality will prevail. Perhaps you have seen a shift in your site with the algorithm change – either up or down. Either way, we need to reanalyze everything we do and ensure we are using the right tools to get the job done today, not last year.

We realize that, as a site owner, you probably use a number of SEO methods to promote your site. And if your rankings are climbing up, or trailing down, you want to know which methods and tools are still valid.

Now we don’t have a crystal ball to see what you are using, but we can tell you that we maintain strict test sites that only utilize SEO from article backlinks – no external comment links, no Facebook, no Twitter, no affiliates. We keep these sites pure so we can make sure the changes and features we add to the Wizard can be tracked and measured properly. So what we can tell you is that all the rankings on these test sites have either remained or improved – and the traffic has INCREASED.

Stop Smoking – #3

Stop Smoking Aids – #1

Stop Smoking Aids Reviews – #1

Plus hundreds of other keywords in varied niches – you get the idea. We just wanted to show you results of TODAY, two weeks after the algorithm change. And we wanted to show you how the sites dominate the vertical of the short and long-tail. (Speaking of which, we have some cool training on how to do this coming very shortly.)

The Google love didn’t stop there either. Have a look at this – the traffic on UAW’s mother site, UberArticles, has shot through the roof – because all we accept is quality content. And we are seeing equally impressive results on sites that accept content from the Wizard. Check it out. UberArticles was increasing in traffic slowly, mostly hovering around the 33,000 mark for the last many months. But since the algorithm shifts of January and February, it has shot up to just over 20,000 and is still climbing!

As directory owners we are lovin’ the increased traffic. As the providers of UAW, we are lovin’ what this change will do for our clients. What else can we say, we are LOVIN’ it – as are others! Here’s an excerpt from a ticket discussing the algorithm.

Hi Spring,

We are loving the new algorithm. All our sites and directories accepting quality content have popped way up in traffic and rankings. Just putting a post together on it. Should have it out today or tomorrow. Will make all UAW members happy

Thanks for your support.

Cheers,
Darren

Spring Estep (Guest) — Yesterday, 7:20 AM

Darren,

I look forward to reading your new post! Apparently, the new algorithm is showing my sites some love as well. I am seeing more traffic, even on my small sites.

Sure, I build backlinks, but I think the main reason is simply GOOD content. That is why I like the fact that Unique Article Wizard forces you to write instead of just spinning out garbage.

Sincerely,

Spring

So while some of the big sites are seeing 50%+ drops in traffic due to the algorithm change as shown here by Sistrix, our test sites and directories are showing increases across the board proving that we are doing the things the right way.

The full post can be found HERE.

So what is the difference? We would have to say that two major things come into play here. The first is that quality prevails as mentioned before. And secondly, the sites cannot be plastered with block upon block of Adsense and advertising, effectively making the articles themselves unreadable.

We need to remember that Google doesn’t need ALL advertisers or allow every site to display its ads. It only needs enough to fill its demand and it will continue to make changes to this effect.

 

So What Should You Be Doing?

Naturally, I can hear the question from many of you ‘What do we do now?’  So here are a couple of statements that we can make without question.

1. If you are scraping sites and mashing content together – Stop!
2. Only put unique content on your site. If you are using your own articles as content for your own site and, at the same time, publishing them unchanged elsewhere – Stop!
   Only put unique content as the main posts on your site; let it get indexed (wait two weeks); then send out spun versions of your article if you like.
3. If you are accepting content from scraping sites or from sites that don’t review their content – Stop! You can’t afford to have junk arrive on your site.
   
4. You need related content on your site that is your own, AND you also need content that is not your own with the appropriate outbound links to random sites. But you must publish content only from sources that you know review everything and hold submissions to a quality standard, like UAW. If you don’t have the UAW plugin on your sites to receive unique content, get it from here. (Also keep your eyes on your inbox for a new tool that will help the UAW community out like nothing before)
5. You need to get backlinks to all the pages on your site. As we always recommend, link to your home page, but also link to your deep pages. It helps!
6. This is a big one. Turn on commenting on your blog posts and reply to each and every comment, even if it is only to say ‘Thanks’. This shows the search engines there is someone home. But here too, you must retain quality, so our recommendation is to manually approve each comment and delete the spam. Make sure you have the Akismet plugin installed on your WordPress sites.For this test, we have two sites that compete for the exact same keywords using the exact same methods. One ranks highly at #1 spots as you can see above. And the other is usually quite a ways down the page, or even on the second page. The only difference? One has commenting turned on and the other doesn’t. Cool, eh!And the other thing we have seen is that you will rank higher if you reply to your comments rather than just approving them. It shows interaction and an active community to the site.

 

What Else Does This Mean as a UAW Client, Affiliate or Site Provider

Not to blow our own horn, but this is fantastic for everyone. We believe this change is going to separate the quality services from the rest in a real hurry. And we truly believe that UAW is uniquely poised (no pun intended) to benefit from this shift. So here are the takeaways.

As a Client

1. Keep submitting your articles. They work!
2. Install the UAW plugins on your sites, so you too can get quality, human-reviewed, UNIQUE content to your sites. Get them HERE. UAW has thousands of members. If everybody just puts the plugins on their sites, the network will grow by tens of thousands. And you know the content is good as it is held to the same standards as your own.
3. Promote as an affiliate. Now is the time to promote as there will be a lot of people heading this way. You might as well get paid for directing them to the right door! Send out your tweets; post on Facebook; set up a review site.

As an Affiliate

1. As above, a lot of people will be heading this way. Time to start promoting. Let us know what we can do to help you do this. We are very accessible. Also, send out tweets and post on Facebook.
2. Install the UAW plugins on your sites, so you too can get quality, human-reviewed, UNIQUE content to your sites. Get them HERE.
3. If you aren’t already, you should be a client of the Wizard and be holding some of those top rankings. A lot of our top affiliates rank highly for SEO keyphrases using the Wizard.

As a Site Provider

1. Please let us know how we can help. If you have other sites that need content, grab the plugins or let us know if you need help getting them to work. Get them HERE.

That’s it. Sorry for being so long winded

Thank you to all who choose to work with UAW. We truly appreciate all of you.

 

Have a fantastic day!

Darren, Noel & the entire UAW Team

PS. Remember to leave comments…we will respond to them all. And please click on the Retweet and Facebook like button (this is the first time I have ever used them I know article marketing, not social media yet!

 

Tags: article marketing, big panda, ezinearticles algorithm, farmer algorithm, google algorithm, panda algorithm, seo, suite101 algorithm

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