As many of you will know, writing articles is a very popular way to increase the number of backlinks pointing to your website.
In theory, the more of these backlinks we get, the more traffic we should get to our website. However, when writing and submitting your articles, there are some important things to keep in mind because you don't want to waste your time, nor do you want your website to be dropped or sandboxed by the major search engines. The first thing to remember is that Rome wasn't built in a day.
If you have a new website, for example about hair loss, you may want to be in the top ten on Google for your search terms within six months. You hear that one way to achieve this is to build a good number of backlinks to that hair website. You think the more the better and start writing article after article. After the first month, you are very proud of yourself because you have managed to write fifty articles that all link back to your new hair website. I think this approach is completely wrong.
The hair loss websites that feature in Google's top ten have probably been around for many years and undoubtedly have a number of quality backlinks. If your website has been around for a long time and you continue to build its backlinks, it will continue to rise up the search engines over time. The one thing you should not do is raise red flags with the search engines. A new website that has eight hundred backlinks after one month could raise this red flag.
The search engines are now unlikely to trust that website and could easily put it in some sort of sandbox until they decide whether it is clean or not. In my opinion, it's important to build up the number of backlinks to a new website relatively slowly. If you are writing articles, I would personally only write one article with a link to a new website per week. Of course, if you have ten websites, you can write ten articles if you decide to put only one link per article and so on.
I also think it's worth submitting the same article to only five or six of the different article directories. I would submit the article to about twenty-two article directories in total, but only have about four variations of it, and so on. The differences between the individual articles are not very big, but they are big enough to make the article more original. There is a lot of discussion in webmaster circles at the moment about the potential damage that duplicate content can cause. From what I've read, everyone seems to have a different opinion on the subject.
I'm of the opinion that it's better to be safe than sorry, so why take the risk? However, it would be good if the major search engines could clarify their position on this issue, but let's face it, that's never going to happen. In conclusion, my advice is to enjoy writing articles, be patient, build up the number of backlinks slowly and submit different variations of the same article to the directories.