Link building is not that easy anymore

You Should Have Seen it. The link building process becomes increasingly difficult. Most of the good, old strategies don’t work any more. You see your traffic going down and wonder what’s happening? Maybe all your SEO efforts are in vain?

Social bookmarking, is it still working?
Social bookmarking sites and web directories are main tools in link building campaigns. But lately, most of them add almost no value to my SEO campaigns. Yes, if you manage to land your article on the first page of the big guys like Digg, you will get a lot of visitors.
For a day or two. But that’s all folks.

Most of these sites use some sort of third party advertising to generate revenue. And most of these advertiser networks have strict rules against links to dangerous websites. The social bookmarking sites can’t afford to check every link because they receive thousands per day. Solution for them was to add nofollow to some or even all outgoing links. Some of them get even further with cloaking links. Now webmasters submit their links, visit the SB websites, link to them but in return, they get nothing. You can submit your article link to hundreds social bookmarking sites and get no visitors and no links at all.

Blog commenting?
With mass usage of nofollow, you’ll only lose your time.

Forum posting?
The same thing. Some forums don’t add nofollow, only until they get enough visitors.

Creating blogs or random pages on the net won’t help you, because they are pages with no value. You must work on any of them to become popular – does it worth its time?

What will be the next, successful SEO strategy?
I don't know. Do you?

Stolen content

These days I found the articles from one of my blogs on an unknown website. Obviously, my content was stolen. Later I found some more websites with my articles on them.

Several sites were using its RSS feed to publish my articles without link or mentioning, stealing my traffic and Google SERP. In fact my site got penalty for duplicate content. My own content!


So I did a little research what to do when site content is stolen.

How to find stolen content?
If your search engine traffic is going down no matter what you are doing or you don’t receive any visitors for your new, fresh and good articles, check for scrapers. The fastest way to find stolen content is to run a search with some specific text from your article in quotes.

What to do when your site content is stolen?
The first thing to do is to contact the scam site owner to remove your content. This part can be easy if he have a proper contact form or email on his site. In my case both sites hadn’t email or contact form. So I used WHOIS service to get their owners details. I got anonymous mails and I mailed them. No response.

Let’s see what Google says.
I found a post in Google Webmaster Central Blog - Duplicate content due to scrapers and this one on Google Adsense Blog - My content, your content, other people's content.
In short you can use this link https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport to report spam site. If you have problems with your traffic, you can try and ask for reconsideration from Google Webmaster tools. And you can fire a DMCA. Here is detailed information on how to do it - http://www.google.com/dmca.html.

You can contact the scraper’s hosting company and try to ask them for action.

In some of the above links I found one very useful advice. Always include your full link in your posts.

Stolen content is a very sensitive topic. It is not always easy to defend your work from cheaters. Most of the time search engines filter scam sites correctly but there is noting perfect. If you find your content stolen don’t panic and take the right actions.

Stolen Content on my SEO Strategy Blog.