What is a good "white hat" content distribution network for link building?

[RosemaryB]

I am helping a client with Local SEO efforts who has hundreds of blog posts (they have been doing 5 a week for the last 3 years) that contain full length articles about their industry.  The client's website itself has been very well optimized for all regards (CRO, Mobile, download speed, citations).  However they have very weak domain authority compared to their competitors.

I am looking for a bona fide content distribution network I could use to promote my client's blog posts/articles.  I have used Linkvana in the past but I have become wary of them after the penguin update.  I also had functionality problems using their interface.

Are their any bona fide content/article distribution networks out there?

Thanks

[jessential]

John Mueller of Google Search recently shared quite a bit on the topic of links and website ranking factors in a Google Webmasters Hangout.

Naturally gaining affirmative incoming links pointing to those blog posts will substantially help. Creating the post is only a first step, I find that marketing the post afterwards takes longer - but also is what really gets the content used.

How I understood the conversation with John Mueller about on-page linking.

When a link is no followed, Google doesn’t pass link juice.

When a link is followed but is no indexed, in this case, Google does pass page rank because they are aware of the page.

When a page is no indexed and the link is nofollow, Google essentially sees it similar to a 404 page and skips it will flag to the spiders that this page is now relevant and to re-crawl the page.

CONCLUSION: When conducting a link audit, reviewing the link risk and considering factors currently ranking sites, the need for SEOs to understand NoFollow links is still necessary. This goes beyond the scope of the content distribution networks that we've tried.

When something is this central to building your domain authority, I agree with Egol that a more hands-on approach has it benefits.

Strong social signals also help a lot: each platform is unique from Google+, to Facebook and LinkedIn for lead generation.

[EGOL]

I don't use a content distribution service for any of my sites.   We simply post content and our visitors do the sharing for us.

The most instructive thing that you can do, since you have a nice body of content already on the site, is to look at that content to identify patterns of the types of articles and topics of articles that pull the most traffic, generate the most shares, accumulat the most links. This information is extremely valuable for informing future content development.

If this company is posting five blog posts per week they are either posting "quick stuff" or they have a lot of people writing for them.  If they have a lot of people writing then look at which of those people are producing the valuable work.  Give them a raise, have them work more hours.  Those that are not producing valuable content can be given different work or not engaged in the future.

My "quick stuff" usually doesn't go anywhere.  "Quick stuff" might not be substantive enough, compelling enough or valuable enough or whatever enough to be shared or linked or liked by visitors.  Out of all of the content on my site a small number of things are rocket fuel, most is pedestrian and some is simply dead wood.  None of that was quick stuff, it is all substantive stuff that we produce and learn from.  Learn what the rocket fuel is made of and make more.  Or, improve the pedestrian to make it stronger.

If you make rocket fuel you generally don't need a content distribution service.... and if you are making quick stuff or dead wood you don't need a content distribution service for that either... instead you need a magician.

[RosemaryB]

Thanks Andy
We are trying to find a method to better utilize the library of content we created.  I was hoping to find a content distribution service that assist with this process.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Rosemary,

I'm not too sure you can use 'bone fide' and 'distribution networks' in the same sentence

Quite seriously, I would be looking to make some headway in their market niche rather than trying to make use of networks. I am sure that between your client and yourself, you can find top industry influencers to engage with and start to build their brand a bit more.

I would be trying to take a more natural approach to this and find forums, discussions, questions (Quora?) and Social Media to make a start with this. Perhaps some of the older articles can be checked to see if they are still relevant and if not, update them with something more current.

I hope this helps.

-Andy