“[ NewsDirect ’ s Idea Marketplace ] looks like a veritable who ’ s who in competitive SEO spam ”
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TRAFFIC
Fig 7 : Spam in any language
Fig 8 : Stretching as far as Japan
UNORTHODOX APPROACH
With its unorthodox approach to press releases , however , NewsDirect added an “ Idea Marketplace ” section to the site in June this year . The strategy was to accommodate more submissions from cutthroat competitive industries . This new section looks like a veritable who ’ s who in competitive SEO spam ( see Fig 7 ).
To sum up , NewsDirect is getting links to its content :
● Via the traditional PR distribution routes , as every distributed press release includes a link to its original source .
● Via additional link building efforts of its clients submitting the PRs and hoping to have them ranking in its target SERPs .
Moreover , it is now expanding beyond the traditionally English language submissions . The Casino section of its Idea Marketplace already contains submissions targeting Brazil , the French-speaking market of Canada , Chile , Czechia , Denmark , Finland and Germany . There are also a few submissions in Japanese
“[ NewsDirect ’ s Idea Marketplace ] looks like a veritable who ’ s who in competitive SEO spam ”
featuring on the top-linked URLs on the NewsDirect site ( see Fig 8 ).
Other non-English language content on NewsDirect may be less obvious but it ’ s starting to become pretty visible in the international SERPs as well . I have recently spotted it ranking in Sweden , for example .
What we are currently observing reminds me of 2012 , when press release sites ranked for just about anything . Then came the Panda 4.0 update and a lot of press release sites lost all their online visibility and eventually ceased to exist .
Will we see a similar outcome now ? Who knows but one thing ’ s for certain : I would not rely solely on ranking parasite content for my site ’ s traffic .
24 • ISSUE 94 • iGB AFFILIATE LONDON 2024