Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Turn SEO data into actionable Content Briefs
      Moz Pro

      Turn SEO data into actionable Content Briefs

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Article Marketing / Article Posting

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Article Marketing / Article Posting

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    3
    848
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • SEOWizards
      SEOWizards last edited by

      I am working on the SEO on a few different websites and I have built out an article marketing campaign so that I can get high quality backlinks for my website.

      I have been writing the content myself and I have been manually building out the top Web 2.0, Article Directory, and Doc Sharing sites.

      today I was creating an account on squidoo and I wondered if it mattered if I had the username be one of two things:

      1. my keyword as a user name, like: [keyword+geotag] example: roofinghouston

      2. just my first and last name as the username (or just a username I always use)

      (The reason behind #1 would be to have the optimized keyword and location I am trying to rank for, inside of the username. The reason for #2 would be that I don't want to get into trouble by having "too much" optimization.)

      I know a bit about optimization and that getting your keyword out there is great in a lot of areas, but I am not sure if it looks "suspicious" if I have my username be the keyword+geotag.

      I am just worried that all of this hard work will be torn down if I look like I'm trying too hard to be optimized, etc etc.

      There is no one answer, I am mainly looking for shared experiences.

      If you do have a definite answer, then I would like that too 🙂

      Thanks SEOMoz!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Textbroker
        Textbroker last edited by

        Unfortunately, article directories didn't carry much link juice to begin with, and as Francisco said, Panda and Penguin have pretty much negated them as SEO tactics entirely. You might want to look at guest blogging, but make sure your articles are really something your readers will enjoy.

        Good luck!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Francisco_Meza
          Francisco_Meza last edited by

          Hi Matthew,

          if you haven't heard of the Penguin update, you HAVE to learn about it. It was an algorithm change on April 24 2012 that hit sites like squidoo. Many people have abuse article marketing (spinning) to try and get more rankings.

          What I would recommend is to make some friends in your industry be using Followerwonk. Post on YOUR site and perhaps they can link to you. There are many blog posts on how to do this.

          Also i recommend you read chapter 7 http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
          • 1 / 1
          • First post
            Last post

          Got a burning SEO question?

          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


          Start my free trial


          Browse Questions

          Explore more categories

          • Moz Tools

            Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

          • SEO Tactics

            Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

          • Community

            Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

          • Digital Marketing

            Chat about tactics outside of SEO

          • Research & Trends

            Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

          • Support

            Connect on product support and feature requests.

          • See all categories

          Related Questions

          • Taiger

            Redirect wordpress from /%post_id%/%postname%/ to /blog/%postname%/

            Hi what is the code to redirect wordpress blog from site.com/%post_id%/%postname%/   to site.com/blog/%postname%/ We are moving the site to a new server and new url structure. Thanks in advance

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger
            0
          • seoman10

            Should brand/company be included in meta title?

            Is there any point/benefit/requirement in using brand/company name in the meta title, I realise search engines like Google prefer brand focused pages, However it is unlikely that someone would be including the company in our search terms. Any thoughts?

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman10
            0
          • xpers

            Should I delete 100s of weak posts from my website?

            I run this website: http://knowledgeweighsnothing.com/ It was initially built to get traffic from Facebook. The vast majority of the 1300+ posts are shorter curation style posts. Basically I would find excellent sources of information and then do a short post highlighting the information and then link to the original source (and then post to FB and hey presto 1000s of visitors going through my website). Traffic was so amazing from FB at the time, that 'really stupidly' these posts were written with no regard for search engine rankings. When Facebook reach etc dropped right off, I started writing full original content posts to gain more traffic from search engines. I am starting to get more and more traffic now from Google etc, but there's still lots to improve. I am concerned that the shortest/weakest posts on the website are holding things back to some degree. I am considering going through the website and deleting the very weakest older posts based on their quality/backlinks and PA. This will probably run into 100s of posts. Is it detrimental to delete so weak many posts from a website? Any and all advice on how to proceed would be greatly recieved.

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xpers
            1
          • ShaqD

            Why is our pagerank is still only 3/10?

            Hi, Our site https://soundbetter.com has been live for 2 years now, and as of yet we haven't yet been able to get our PageRank above 3/10. We have thousands of unique pages and plenty of original contextual content, we avoid duplicate content best we can, follow google's best practices for site structure, deal with any issues that come up in webmaster tools, have schema.org markup, avoid link spamming, have inbound links from authority sites (though OSE doesn't show most of them for some reason), lots of social shares to our pages and the domain has been owned by us for 12 years. Any thoughts on why we would still have a PR of 3? Thanks for helping

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShaqD
            0
          • Travis-W

            Ending URLs in .html versus /

            Hi there! Currently all the URLs on my website, even the home page, end it .html, such as http://www,consumerbase.com/index.html Is this bad?
            Is there any benefit to this? Should I remove it and just have them end with a forward slash?
            If I 301 redirect the old .html URLs to the forward slash URLs, will I lose PA? Thanks!

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
            0
          • COEDMediaGroup

            301 redirect with /? in URL

            For a Wordpress site that has the ending / in the URL with a ? after it... how can you do a 301 redirect to strip off anything after the / For example how to take this URL domain.com/article-name/?utm_source=feedburner and 301 to this URL domain.com/article-name/ Thank you for the help

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | COEDMediaGroup
            0
          • UnderRugSwept

            /%category%/%postname%/ Permalink structure

            Mostly everyone seems to agree that /%category%/%postname%/ is the best blog structure. I'm thinking of changing my structure to that because now it's structured by date which is bad. But almost all of my posts are assigned to more than one category. Won't this create duplicate pages?

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | UnderRugSwept
            0
          • kolio_kolev

            How to make SEF URL for PHP/MySQL web site

            Hi mozzers! I'm fairly new to SEO topic, but I'm learning fast because all of you, so please take my warm thanks first! The problem: I have a web site based on PHP/MySQL that has no SEF addresses, it's made by unknown CMS, so I cannot use any extensions or modules, I have to write my own SEF extension. The question: Would you suggest me, please an article or idea, what I need to make my URLs search engine friendly? What's best to use: .htaccess or something else? This is the aforementioned web site: www.nortrak.bg Thanks a lot, Kolio

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kolio_kolev
            0

          Get started with Moz Pro!

          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

          Start my free trial
          Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz API
          • Moz Data
          • STAT
          • Product Updates
          Moz Solutions
          • SMB Solutions
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Digital Marketers
          Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Authority Checker
          • Link Explorer
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • Brand Authority Checker
          • Local Citation Checker
          • MozBar Extension
          • MozCast
          Resources
          • Blog
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Help Hub
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • How-to Guides
          • Moz Academy
          • API Docs
          About Moz
          • About
          • Team
          • Careers
          • Contact
          Why Moz
          • Case Studies
          • Testimonials
          Get Involved
          • Become an Affiliate
          • MozCon
          • Webinars
          • Practical Marketer Series
          • MozPod
          Connect with us

          Contact the Help team

          Join our newsletter
          Moz logo
          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
          • Accessibility
          • Terms of Use
          • Privacy

          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.