ArticleRanks is one of the many content distribution systems that are currently around, so is ArticleRanks better than any of the other similar systems?
Firstly an overview of what ArticleRanks is:
In a nutshell, it allows you to publish your articles on a blog network in order to gain backlinks to your site.
ArticleRanks also allows you to receive content for your blog (if you want new content and/or to earn credits).
The process of submitting an article is:
- You create articles in spintax format (either pre-formatted or using the ArticleRanks article spinning options)
- Select your article category and tags.
- Select a distribution date and hit the publish button.
ArticleRanks Overview
| Product: | ArticleRanks |
| Creator: | DigitalConnectedMedia Group |
| Product Type: | Article Submission Network |
| Membership Types: | Purchase/earn credits to spend on each article submission or monthly membership |
How ArticleRanks Works
The best way to demonstrate how ArticleRanks operates is by watching the video below.
Advantages of ArticleRanks
In the past, I’ve been a big user of Free Traffic System (FTS), but after a while I found out that the total number of backlinks you gain is very minimal due to the limit on the number of sites your article is submitted to and the low quality of the blogs (that frequently disappear).
I tried out ArticleRanks early in 2010, as I was looking for an alternative to FTS. I also considered SEOLinkVine, but the price really put me off.
It didn’t take long to work out why ArticleRanks was so much better.
The number one reason is the quality of the blog network and the quality of the articles.
Firstly, in order to gain credits for accepting ArticleRanks articles on your blog, your blog must have a Page Rank of one or higher. This means that a lot of the blogs on the network are established sites with existing page rank that helps boost your link juice.
Secondly, there are various anti-spam mechanisms in place to help prevent junk or low quality articles on the ArticleRanks network. This benefits not just the blog owners, but also the people submitting articles as it means the sites the articles are submitted to aren’t seen as low quality sites that are filled with mostly spam posts.
ArticleRanks also claim to add their own high PR sites into the network each month.
As a blog owner, if you receive articles from ArticleRanks, you have the options to limit the number of articles you receive, whether articles are auto-approved and auto-reject articles that falls below a set threshold of uniqness.
Another very good reason I like ArticleRanks is the number of sites my articles get published to. Sites like FTS, have a quite low maximum number of sites your article will be published to.
With ArticleRanks, the lowest number of sites my articles has been published on is 72 and the highest is 145. Also remember that your article can have up to 3 links in it.
Spinning Articles for ArticleRanks
While there are facilities in ArticleRanks for spinning your articles, they are a little clumsy. What I do is spin my article using The Best Spinner.
However, for some strange reason, ArticleRanks doesn’t use the most common spintax format, so you need to export your spun article from The Best Spinner with the correct format.
This is easy to to with The Best Spinner. It just requires defining an spintax export format for ArticleRanks.
The screenshot below shows what to define for the ArticleRanks export format:
Conclusion on ArticleRanks
ArticleRanks is currently my number one choice for article submissions.
The ArticleRanks interface is well designed and easy to navigate.
In general, I’ve noticed some good improvements in rankings from backlinks gained from ArticleRanks, and more importantly, most of those backlinks haven’t disappeared a few months later.
Click here to check out ArticleRanks
Cheers
Hi Peter,
As per Shane’s recommendation I’ve also just started using AR.
The only problem I have with AR is that they don’t tell you where they publish the article you submit. There’s neither a URL nor the spun title. The only way I know where it’s been published is via a pingback. However, that isn’t reliable since I only get about 2 pingbacks out of 13 blog submissions.
Do you have the same problem? How do you work around it?
PS: I agree with you on FTS. 20% of the articles I’ve submitted have had their links stripped by the blog owners. 🙁
See you over at IMImpact.
Hi Lorenzo.
Article Ranks has the same policy as pretty much all other similar blog networks in that they don’t reveal what sites the articles get published on.
You are correct that the number of pingbacks you’ll receive is quite low and not a reflection of the number of articles published.
Generally what I do is treat my backlinks as a whole, ie: I don’t really care what method was used to create them. You can extract your backlinks (although there’s no method that will get 100% of the links) via SEOmoz, SEOmajestic or a tool like Scrapebox.
Once you’ve got all the links, you can ping them via pingfarm.com and boost the backlinks using your favourite method, eg: article directory submissions or a service like backlinkindexer.com
Cheers
Peter
I am not really an expert in marketing and online businesses in general, though after reading through this article I can see the inherent benefit of utilizing programs such as ArticleRanks, and by extension The Best Spinner as well.
What would attract me to ArticleRanks is the ability to use it in its “free mode.” This is great because a potential buying customer can have the opportunity to utilize the program, albeit in a sort of stripped down “demo” mode. Regardless, you will know what you are getting into before putting money into it.
With money on the mind, this program seems like it would be very useful for individuals working on their own blogs; as it can often be difficult (or in the least, tedious) to write up fresh articles on your own. As someone who reads blogs, the only concern would be over-usage of this program.
Really though, both products seem very legitimate and can be beneficial if used appropriately. I’ve also read about The Best Spinner in the past, and it seems to be a equally quality program itself.