Link popularity has been a raging topic over the last few years as search engines have used the number of inbound links to proxy for the popularity of a website--hence the term link popularity. Webmasters unfortunately took high advantage of the search engines, creating massive link farms, where hundreds or thousands of websites would band together and all link to each other, artificially inflating their sites' link popularity versus those of sites which did not employ such 'black hat' linking strategies.



Due to intensive banning of the various methods of link farming and web rings, a recently popularized method of gaining the coveted inbound links has been that of writing articles and submitting these articles to article directories. These article directories become a dissemination point for the articles and their embedded links, allowing the inbound links to propagate quite naturally on the internet, creating a resurgence in the topic of link popularity.

Once again, automation has ruled the day, and website owners have not only automated the submission of articles, but have developed software that searches the web for bits and pieces of articles that can be reformed to create new articles. Nonsense articles, but articles nonetheless. As a result, the latest whisper on the web is that the largest search engine of all will soon be banning sites created with these types of software.

But, back to the original topic.

When you submit articles to reputable article directories and allow them to publish your works with your links intact, does your link popularity go up?

My experience tells me that it does. Article marketing is my primary form of advertising, search engine optimization, and link popularity building, and in the span of 9 months, I have sent 3 different websites to high levels of link popularity. In fact, my most recent site addition, launched on August 3 of this year (today is September 1) has 41 inbound links in Google and 31 inbound links in Yahoo, and the only, I repeat only, method of promotion has been article marketing. Another interesting statistic: the website was indexed by Google in only 3 days, with no site submission whatsoever, only article marketing.

So, it works for me. If you are article marketing yourself, you should know that it works for you. If not, give it a try. There may only be a limited window of time before 'black hat' web tricksters will employ techniques that will again enrage the search engines and make link popularity as we know it a thing of the past.