Blogging on Drupal Blogs. White Hat or ?

[potterharry]

Recently, we noticed a website in our site rise higher in SERP shortly after launching. The key strategy they are using is to Blog on High PR Drupal Blogs, which allow you to create profile and write articles.

What does the community here think of such tactic.  Is it a grey area, or considered a White Hat technique?

[Chris.Menke]

You're asking if, independent of content, can the a CMS, such as Drupal ( or Joomla or Wordpress, etc) help your rankings, is that right?

The answer to that would be no.  A CMS can hurt your SEO and it can make SEO easier or more difficult but which CMS is used is not a search engine ranking factor.

[potterharry]

Thanks Chris.

In terms of their tactics, they use article spinning, which we all know will not work in long run.

The one question is around the type of Drupal sites. Lot of these are from non-English sites, covering cooking, imperialism etc etc. whereas the links are to an online coupon site, and seems irrelevant. I would think that the domain/type of blog would play a role in passing PageRank. Further, they have thousands of links (using Scrapebox) I believe, as they have single user create these links.  Source of this information is Ahrefs (and Open Site Explorer) data. There could well be other things that help them, and we dont see it.

My biggest question is does posting high quality content to High PR Drupal blog help.

Thanks again for your valuable inputs

[Chris.Menke]

Potter,

There' nothing inherently wrong with that and ypically, you wouldn't consider the site's platform to play a part in a site's ranking ability.

Writing good quality articles and getting them posted individually on other blogs is not considered black hat. Done correctly, this is high-quality marketing effort that can build brand recognition and promote social sharing.

The other side of the coin would be writing low-quality articles and posting them to article marketing sites in the hopes that they'll be distributed to hundreds of other sites.  Whether that this tactic is black hat or not may be open to interpretation, but as an effective SEO strategy, it's not something you want to bank on and it could leave you open to a google penalty in the future.

The third side of the coin would be creating empty profiles on forum-type sites just to get a link from the profile to your site.  This can often be done on a large scale by low-end link builders, there aren't usually articles involved, and the links back to the site usually have very targeted anchor text. This would be considered a black hat effort and they stand a chance of getting knocked out of the search results for it, at some point in the future.

There may be other things that are helping that site rank better than yours other than what you mentioned.  Just as likely, there are things that you should be doing to help yourself that you're not doing.  If the other guy is just doing the second and/or third things mentioned above and their site is out performing yours, then you need to get to work doing some real marketing and yours will easily reclaim its position.