Unless you’ve been living under a rock or you’re new to the internet marketing scene, you’ll know that the recent Google Penguin update caused havoc for a lot of internet marketers and online businesses both large and small. And Google didn’t lose any sleep over the fact that they wiped out some people practically overnight. I suggest you read these posts to learn more about what happened, why and how it influences how you should promote your sites from now on…

Continuing Fallout For Affiliate Marketers From Google Penguin Update
For The First Time In History Links Can Hurt You!
Market Samurai Half Price Offer (10 Days Only) – watch the video on this post but ignore the Market Samurai offer. There’s some very valuable insights in the video.

How The Penguin Changed The Backlinking Landscape

I build backlinks using a variety of methods but there’s one thing I apply to each of those methods – build links slowly and over the long term. Google likes to see backlinks being generated for a site consistently and creating 1,000 links in one day and doing nothing else after that will raise red flags with them.

Backlink building is a pain the ass (at least I find it a pain in the ass) but without it, your sites are just going to languish in the dead-ends of the internet where nobody goes. I also have a lot of sites so, while manually building links is perfectly doable for a few sites, it becomes problematical when you have a lot of them.

So some form of automation becomes necessary just so the job can be done in the time available.

Prior to Penguin, many used blog networks for syndicating their articles. Google, however, were sneaky. They got people to join these networks, post articles and track where they ended up. They were then able to identify the blogs concerned and then deindexed those blogs. That killed off the blog networks. There are still a couple around that either weren’t identified by Google or not hit for some reason. I’ve heard, anecdotally, that one network now has small print that makes it illegal for Google to do what they did with other blog networks.

Site owners also used to do burst backlinking – where they’d create a large number of backlinks to their site in a very short period of time. That strategy now rings alarm bells at Google.

Another tactic site owners used was to put their prime keyword(s) in the anchor text of all their backlinks. These kind of links look unnatural to Google. Sites using this strategy were penalized by Penguin and if you used this tactic, that’s one reason why your site might have dropped position in the search results.

SEO Backlinking In A Post-Penguin World

Ok, so you now know what doesn’t work and what might have damaged your site’s rankings.

Here’s how to build backlinks from now on…

  1. Don’t use blog networks for building backlinks. I don’t think it’s worth the potential future damage to use any surviving networks.
  2. Build links slowly over a longer time period.
  3. Mix up your anchor text. Use your primary keyword for a site homepage or an internal page in about 25% of links.

    Use variations of keywords about 25% of the time; e.g. if your primary keyword was “weight loss diet”, use keyword variations like “weight loss”, “fat loss diet”, “diet for weight loss”, etc.

    Use related terms in about 25% of links.

    And for the remaining 25% of links, use generic anchor text like “click here”, “go here”, “YourDomanName.com”, “www.YourDomainName.com”, etc – the kind of text someone on another site would use to link to your site.

Automation Tools

1. Unique Article Wizard

Unique Article WizardUnique Article Wizard [UAW] (reviewed here) isn’t a blog network; it submits articles to article directories, so works in a different way to blog networks. It was not targeted by Penguin and continues to be one of the best tools for building SEO backlinks. I use it routinely. It costs $67 per month so might be too expensive for some of you.

With this tool you can submit spintext articles that get spun into unique articles for publication at the various article directories. There’s nothing special about spintext – you can write it yourself. UAW asks that you rewrite each sentence in your article three different ways and have at least 5 paragraphs in your article. You can use a tool like The Best Spinner or SpinRewriter to help you, but these tools only spin at the word/phrase level and not at the sentence level. If you write Spintext, you’ll need something to extract unique articles for you. The Best Spinner and SpinRewriter will also do that for you as does another option detailed below.

Despite their claims, they will not produce a readable spintext article for you with the click of a button. You need to manually choose what synonyms you want to use in your articles and read through the variations in your head to make sure they make sense. UAW do a manual review of all articles submitted to their service and any that don’t read well will be rejected for publication.

2. SENuke TNG SENuke XCr

I’ve been using SENuke X (now upgraded to SENuke TNG) for about 15 months. It’s an expensive tool at $147 per month (or $997 per year) but it’s the most powerful tool around for building SEO backlinks. It’s a complex tool and has a steep learning curve. So it’s really only a tool for those who already know something about SEO and have a solid strategy for link building.

I Hate Writing Articles

But what if you’re not good at writing, English isn’t your first language or you don’t know anything about the topic of the site you’re building/promoting?

If you have PLR articles lying around on your hard drive, you can always put them to use. The best thing to do would be to spintext them rather than using the PLR articles “as is” since others will have done just that.

You can always hire a writer to put articles together for you. Article costs range from $2-$10 depending on where you source them from and how good the writers are. Remember, you get what you pay for. Here are some places to look:

iWriter
Fiverr
iNeedArticles
Upwork
MyArticleExpress

Another option is to sign up with a service that provides articles for you on a range of topics – you just pick what you need when you need it. The two I use are:

1. Article Builder: This is from Jonathan Leger and lets you create spintext articles you can plug into your sites, Unique Article Wizard or to manually submit to article directories. There are currently 85 niches to pick from (the list is on the Article Builder page). All the articles are pre-spun for you or you can request single unique articles. Here’s a video showing how simple it is to create articles:

Article Builder costs $297 per year (or $87 every 3 months). It may seem expensive but you can create up to 400 articles each day; that works out at a cost of $0.002 per article. In all likelihood you wouldn’t create 400 articles per day so articles will work out to be somewhat more expensive. Each spintext article is made up of a number of articles you set, so you might specify that a spintext article be made up from 10 individual articles. That would be 10 articles used from your 400 daily limit. Such an article would cost about $0.08.

Article Builder can be used to craft spintext articles that are suitable for Unique Article Wizard – click the Advanced Options link and tick the Have the same number of paragraphs in each article and Spin articles together checkboxes before building your article (see video above). Articles need some minor modification before they can be submitted to UAW – you need to remove the blank lines before the pipe (|) characters and not have line breaks before the pipe characters. So text like this produced by Article Builder:

{Bring your family with you into the world of juicing. The child can clean off the vegetables and fruits as an adult cuts them up.

|Drink your juice before you eat your food. The nutrients from the juice will be more efficiently absorbed by your empty stomach. The juice will help to control your appetite at mealtimes and you’ll eat less.

|Use a masticating juicer. This type of juicing equipment works to extract the juices in a more gentle way and the liquids retain more nutrients as a result. Juice from masticating juicers also stands up better to storage.

}

should be edited so that it looks like this:

{Bring your family with you into the world of juicing. The child can clean off the vegetables and fruits as an adult cuts them up.|Drink your juice before you eat your food. The nutrients from the juice will be more efficiently absorbed by your empty stomach. The juice will help to control your appetite at mealtimes and you’ll eat less.|Use a masticating juicer. This type of juicing equipment works to extract the juices in a more gentle way and the liquids retain more nutrients as a result. Juice from masticating juicers also stands up better to storage.}

If you don’t do that, then UAW won’t be able to process the article properly and you’ll get warnings about bad HTML in the article. It took me a while to figure that one out!

I always do additional word and phrase-level spinning on the article titles to be sure they’re going to be more unique when published. Depending on the article, I might also do some word and phrase spinning on some of the paragraphs, especially if the same paragraphs pop up several times in an article, which can happen – it’s the nature of random selection that some items get repeated every now and then.

Articles created by Article Builder can be used “as is” in SENuke XCr. In fact, if you have a subscription to both, SENuke XCr can pull articles from Article Builder automatically, which speeds up article submissions enormously using its new “Turbo Wizard” feature.

2. The Leading Articles: Articles created by Article Builder are pretty good but they’re not perfect. Some suggest that they’re not good enough to use for your Tier-1 links (the links that point directly to your website) but are better used for Tier-2 and above links (a Tier-2 link is a link that points to a site that, in turn, points to your site). An example of a Tier-1 link would be one you put on a Squidoo lens that points to your own website. A Tier-2 link would be a link on an article directory that points to the Squidoo lens rather than to your site directly.

If I’m concerned about using top-notch articles for my Tier-1 links, then I’ll use articles supplied by The Leading Articles. These guys also create spintext articles but they’re of a higher quality because they’re spun by humans rather than by combining similar articles – the approach that Article Builder takes. They include a tool for members for extracting a spun version of an article. You can get access to the tool if you sign up with them, even for a free account.

Each of these human spun articles can be downloaded by 300 members. Once that limit is reached, that article is removed from the membership. This means you get access to very unique articles. These articles are more expensive, going for $5-$8 each, depending on the level of membership you take out. However, those prices are what you’d pay to have just one un-spun article written at the usual article writing services.

3. Another Option: There’s another option and that is to submit an article you’ve written or a PLR article to MyArticleExpress and have them do the two rewrites for you so your article is ready for submission to Unique Article Wizard or SENuke XCr. These article rewrites will set you back about $10 (i.e. you get two rewrites for the $10).

Putting It All Together

I use Web 2.0 properties such as Squidoo lenses, Hubpages, YouTube, WordPress.org blogs (not self-hosted WordPress blogs), Tumblr, LiveJournal, etc. to link to my sites. These are my Tier-1 links (some of them anyway). I always check an article to make sure it reads well before I submit it for publication. Some articles I write myself (on topics I know something about). For topics I’m not familiar with, I’ll get an article from Leading Articles. If no suitable article is available there, I’ll resort to using Article Builder, pick a spun article I like and clean it up so it reads better.

I do use Unique Article Wizard to submit articles from Article Builder and/or The Leading Articles that backlink to my own sites as well as to my Tier-1 sites, so I’m mixing it up a bit there. I use SENuke XCr to do the same thing.

I use articles from Article Builder primarily for my Tier-2, Tier-3, etc, backlinks as these require more articles and Article Builder provides cheap, decent articles.

SENuke has the ability to build complex link trees where links point to links that point to links that point to your site (how complex the link tree is depends on the linking strategy you select when building your article submission campaign). Here’s the kind of link tree that SENuke XCr is able to create:

In all cases where I’m building backlinks, I mix up the anchor text in links like I discussed at the top of this post.

And then rinse and repeat.

Where all these services come into their own is in saving me time and allowing me to achieve much more than I could doing everything myself in the time I have available.

Given there is a cost involved is using these tools, I know that not everyone will be in a position to buy them, but if you do have a budget for marketing tools, the two I’d suggest you start out with are Unique Article Wizard and Article Builder.

And, if you can’t afford the tools, check out the services page for some alternatives.

 

All the best,

Gary Nugent

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P.S.: Don't forget, if you want to create an internet income of your own, here's one of my recommended ways to do that:

 

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