The new word for linkbuilding is content distribution or content marketing.  Social media sharing, guest blogging, file sharing, RSS feed, etc community or network sites have been popping up to take over the role of what was previously considered link farms.  These are essentially the same strategy as link farms, where people join the network and share each others’ content.  Except, instead of just providing outright anchor text links, like this “home sauna health benefits“, the idea is to be more vague about what you are gaining in search results and encourage a diverse sharing that builds more diverse backlink profiles and social signals for the participating members. The issue in the past was if the network was not diverse enough and had the same members linking to each other, your backlink profile grew, but had limited diversity.  Now that link farms are actively being penalized, the more incestuous networks are the easiest for Google to identify, making these not just a questionable benefit, but high risk.

Review of Content Distribution & Marketing Communities

This is a growing list of content distribution networks that I am trying out, so that I can give you my honest opinion and review.  Please feel free to leave comments on your own suggestions and reviews of content marketing websites.

Viral Buzz Content

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I like this service because it is free and it encourages people to become active in a particular category so they can share their own content, browse other people’s content and share it.  With the simplicity of being a aggregate of content in your preferred categories, with social sharing enabled, the concept is solid.  To ensure high quality, your social channels (essentially Facebook and Twitter accounts) where you intend to share content are checked by the system to ensure they are high quality accounts that engage with a good size crowd.  My own personal Facebook and Twitter accounts actually did not make the grade.  I was somewhat shocked that I was not allowed to share content on my personal Facebook account.  I may consider myself a thought leader (LOL), though I don’t have a large following in my personal Facebook account populated mainly with personal friends.  Nonetheless, I am giving this network a try and have already posted this Google Plus SEO article in their member sharing section.

Join Viral Content Now!

My Blog Guest

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This guest blogging network is similar to the Viral Buzz Content concept above, though a bit more advanced in that people are not just sharing published content, but unpublished, unique content that has not yet been seen.  Sort of like an elance bidding platform, website owners and writers are connected.  The terms of use for content is based on preferences of the writer and publisher.

Blog Engage

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RSS feed syndication service that is paid, ranging from $9.99 per month to $99.99 per month.  The syndication lives on about 5 domains, ranging from PageRank 2-4.  Not very impressive for the homepage of a feed syndication.  The promotions I’ve read, try to sell you on the link building value of receiving high quantity links from 3 websites.  Sorry, but I’m not impressed.  I will not bother participating in this paid RSS syndication service.

Technorati

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Essential RSS syndication.  Enough said.

Blog Catalog

Thumbs Medium :/
RSS syndication website that used to give do follow links to all members, then restricted it to a paid option, but now that it has gained enough traction, it relies solely on providing you visibility to its audience. I’m not totally convinced on the effectiveness of their reach, but its a free option worth the time to set it up.

Atlanta Bloggers

Thumbs up Great example of an individually managed RSS aggregator website in a niche area.  Anyone can submit their website blog RSS feed, but each is personally reviewed by the site owner for quality and relevance.  Those that are approved receive a followed links from the homepage using the RSS feed to populate the title of the most recent 10 posts.

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