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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

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

 Spintax Generator For Hyperlinks

Like a lot of marketers, I use a variety of tools and websites for generating and submitting spun articles.  Software like The Best Spinner, Article Marketing Robot and blog submission sites like Article Ranks.

One task I often found to be very clumsy and prone to formatting errors, was creating links in spintax format.

I hate doing any processes manually, so I decided to create a simple tool called Spintaxer which makes the process of creating hyperlinks in spintax format a breeze.

Click here to access the Spintaxer tool (it’s completely free)

If you’ve been in Internet Marketing for long enough, you know just how important it is to submit articles to article directories for effective backlinking/SEO results.

There are many article spinning products and services currently available, but pretty much all suffer from the same symptom of producing poorly spun articles that at best, are barely acceptable to most article directories, and at worst, they are virtually unreadable and have a high rejection rate.

I’d heard a lot of good things about The Best Spinner, so I decided to check it out for myself and see if it lived up to all the spin (pun intended).

Luckily, you can get a $7 trial, where you get 7 days to try the software to see if you like it, and if you decide to keep it, you are charged $77 per year.

What’s Good About The Best Spinner?

The main thing that sets The Best Spinner apart from other similar spinning software products is the user generated thesaurus. This means that whenever The Best Spinner shows you a list of synonyms, the list of suggestions has been built over time by the thousands of users.  The software uses a weighted system, so that the more people use a particular synonym, the higher up the list it will be.  This means that you generally get very useful set of synonyms to choose from.

The Best Spinner will also work with short phrases as well as single words.  Some spinning products will only do single word replacements.  Having phrase replacements increases the uniqueness of the article.

Some of the other very good features of The Best Spinner are:

• The ability to export to various spintax formats.  This is great if you want to use your spun article with another product or website that uses a different spin syntax.  You can even define your own syntax.
• Nested Spinning.  The Best Spinner has unlimited levels of nested spinning, which you can color code up to four levels in order to make it easier to track.
• You can automatically generate up to 250 spun articles from your spun text.
• There is a word count and uniqueness percentage which is constantly updated as you work on your text.
• You can save a “Favorites” list of commonly used synonyms that you commonly use in your articles.

What’s Bad About The Best Spinner?

To be honest, I can’t really find any bad points.  Possibly the only thing that might put some people off is the $77 per year charge, but I consider that to be a pretty good payment for a piece of software that works really well.  Don’t forget that the annual subscription fee ensures you always have access to the latest thesaurus.

Conclusion

The Best Spinner is a very useful tool to have in the arsenal of the Internet Marketer if you use it wisely.   Like any Internet Marketing piece of software, it’s not a magic bullet, but it sure makes the process of unique article generation a lot easier and much faster.

There are so many article directories available that you could spend a lifetime trying to post to all of them.  However, that would be a monumental waste of time and effort as not all article directories are created equal.  What you really want to do is target your articles to the directories that are going to have the most authority.

In general, this means posting to article directories that have a high PR and have dofollow links.  That last point is very important.  There’s not much point in posting your article to a directory that has nofollow links as that will have minimal/no effect on your search engine rankings.

I’ve put together the following list of what I consider to be the best directories to post to.  If you’ve discovered any others that are valuable, please let me know.

Also, if you are serious about writing articles, you should read my The Best Spinner Review.