I think its time for many Affiliate Marketers (AM) to reconsider their methods for building their web sites Search Engine position. I have been using Blog and Ping techniques for about a year now, but blog and ping is slowing loosing its effectiveness because so many AMs are using the method.
If youve been living on the dark side of the moon, then you may not know what Blog and Ping is all about. Well, in a nutshell, blog and ping is a technique for increasing your websites position by creating blogs and using software that automatically posts to those blogs along with links back to your main website. The blogs then ping Blog services to notify them that some new content is available. The ping services then attract Search Engine spiders and before to long, youre website is spidered.
This solution worked like wonders about a year ago (2005), but is loosing its effectiveness because all the blog and ping tools create mediocre content that is all based on Search Engine scrapes or RSS feeds. You end up getting a blog site full of useless information with links back to your web page. The Search Engines have caught on and they are able to filter out the bad content. In fact, it may actually be hurting your website. Theres no proof yet, but I would expect that all the SEs will soon start penalizing websites that are trying to boost their position through blog and ping techniques.
That brings me to articles. About four months ago, I wrote an article and posted it to ArticleCity. After I submitted it, I forgot about it. Just yesterday, during a moment of boredom, I thought about that article and decided to do some research. Had anyone picked it up? A quick search on Google showed that the article has been published on 802 different websites! I also noticed that after Googles last update, the Page Rank (PR) of my affiliate marketing website went up nicely from 3 to 5.