Content Distribution & Content Marketing Communities: the evolved link farm?

Updated February 25, 2013

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

Thumbs Up 🙂
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

Thumbs Up 🙂
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

Thumbs Down 🙁
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

Thumbs Up 🙂
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.

There are 2 comments for this article
  1. bbrian017 at 11:31 am

    Hi Gregory. if you take the time, sign up to Blog Engage and engage with our community you will find we are bay far the best site on the internet for bloggers. I have been online marketing since 2007 and I’ve seen sites like all these come and go and some site there and do nothing for years…

    At the end of the day you always get what you pay for and you can ask our community, 99% of our members love blog engage and if you actually gave it a try without putting “thumbs down” you may find as well we are awesome people.

    So for future reference, before you “review” a service, make sure you actually use it. Doing reviews like this tarnish your name as you clearly have no idea the value of benefit of Blog Engage without purchasing an account and using it for three months.

  2. Gregory Lee Author at 6:16 am

    Sorry Brian, but everything I’ve read just shows me no value…just a lot of affiliates pushing it with no concrete benefits. How about some numbers to back up the value? Like how many members in the community? How much traffic do your sites get where the syndication feeds live? Even success case studies would be helpful. I’m happy to post any helpful new information and change the rating appropriately.

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