Most Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts agree that links back to your site have a great impact on your ranking in the major search engines. Think of it like an election; your site is a candidate and every link to your site is a vote. Of course, it was never quite that simple (high ranking, relevant sites have more voting power) but now it may have gotten even more complicated.



The Dampening Link Filter

It seems that Google may have introduced something called a “Dampening Link Filter” into its indexing algorithm. I'll give you a layperson's overview of this filter, but for more intimate details, check out http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/searchinsider/wpn-49-20050407GooglesNewLinkFilter.html#google.

More and more people are realising the importance of links back to your site (or “backlinks”). For some time, companies have been engaging in all sorts of link campaigns designed to generate thousands of backlinks. Many of these campaigns haven't really paid too much attention to the context or lifespan of these links. And Google knows it. Because these campaigns are designed to artificially generate the perception of a site's importance – to trick the search engines into thinking they're important – it's been suggested that Google has decided to put an end to it. Apparently, there's evidence to suggest that Google has introduced a new link filter to dampen the effect of new backlinks. So if your link generation campaign has just created 500 links in a day from seemingly irrelevant sites, Google will suspect it of being artificial, and refuse to pass on the full effect of those links – at least for a while. Well, that's how the theory goes, anyway.

It has been argued that you can avoid being penalized by this filter by generating links:

• more slowly;

• from relevant sites; and

• which have a long lifespan.

The wisdom of relevance and lifespan is already well established; the dampening filter is simply one more reason why people should start to heed it. Writing and submitting SEO articles for online publication is one way to do so.

This article explains how SEO articles satisfy each of these three conditions. (For the basics of SEO article writing, take a look at http://www.divinewrite.com/seoarticles.htm.)

Build Backlinks Slowly

Writing quality articles takes time. It's as simple as that. Even an SEO copywriter can't just bang an article together in a morning – it has to be well considered. It must be accurate, informative, interesting, well written, and topical. And once you've written the article, the real work begins. You then have to submit it to your favourite article submit sites. And as they all have different requirements and idiosyncrasies, submitting your article to 50 submit sites can take you all day!

Once submitted, even the best articles will only be published gradually. A good article can be published 2 or 3 times a day for a week or two, then interest tapers off. But still, over the course of 6 months a single good article can be published hundreds of times! And remember, each time is a link.

Build Backlinks From Relevant Sites

As soon as you choose the topic of your article, you define the type of site that will publish it. All online publishers have an agenda; they want to generate traffic. Whether for commercial or benevolent reasons, they want particular kinds of articles for very specific audiences. Your article won't be published on irrelevant sites simply because the publishers of those sites get nothing out of it.

Of course, your article may be published on sites that are only marginally relevant. For instance, this article may be published on general copywriting websites, advertising websites, web design websites, home business websites, etc. But the beauty of a well written SEO article is that you get to optimize it for the keywords that you want to rank for. So even if the keywords on the publishing site don't quite match your own target keywords, the page containing your link (i.e. your article) does.

What's more, you even have the power to optimize the links themselves. For instance, as an SEO copywriter, I can distribute backlinks throughout my article that use my target keywords as the link text (e.g. copywriter, SEO copywriter, advertising copywriter, and website copywriter ;-). Some submit sites don't let you do this, but most will – at least in the byline.

And one other thing – other people link to good articles. This can increase the Page Rank of the site containing your article, which, in turn, can increase the page rank of your own site. It's a win-win situation!

Build Backlinks With a Long Lifespan

The quality of your SEO article determines the lifespan of your backlink. Write a very helpful article, make it easy to read, and choose a topic which isn't going to go away in a hurry, and your article will stay online for years.

In any event, most publishers tend not to clear out their article libraries simply because it's better for them to have lots of content available to both readers and search engines.

Conclusion

While it's no new phenomenon to SEO veterans and SEO copywriters, the writing of SEO articles to generate backlinks is a tactic which offers much in the way of ranking. The possibility of a Google dampening link filter simply increases the value of that offering.

Happy writing!