Do we need articles?

I just wrote the following as a reply on DP but I thought I would post it here to see what happens:

Duplicate content plus backlinks will beat original content with no links.
For proof look at the Viagra boys. They get first place with 100,000 backlinks and no content at all!

What is an "Article? We all know it is 400 words of fluff wrapped around a long tail keyword. Whether we write it, buy it, spin it or steal it we know they are rubbish.

So why submit one to an article directory? Or 100 article directories?
To get a backlink.
In theory some discerning person (or people) will be so impressed with the quality of our prose that they will "syndicate" it which will give us more backlinks (but more duplicate content)

What REALLY happens is that it might get scraped by spammers who use it on their own auto-generated Adsense site. Oh wow. What an honor.

So we don't really want articles at all do we? We want real quality (not junk) information on our own website and we want backlinks.

Well, if you just want backlinks from high PR on-topic blogs you can use a tool like Comment Kahuna or similar to comment on other people's sites and get a do-follow backlink.

Or you can fire up a totally Black Hat tool like Xrumer and spray your links all over the internet.

Or you can create such a genuinely high quality site that people will link to it because it is so darned good or funny or interesting.

Think about it. We don't really need articles. At least we don't need the spammy rubbish we jokingly call articles.

We just need backlinks and there are easier ways to get them.

I think the key here is balance.

If we made funny content, that get linked from digg or similar, we get a kind of traffic.

If lots or blogs links funny things from our site, thanks to digg, we will get backlinks, but not lots of traffic

Those backlinks will make our site rank better in google, and that will give us more traffic.

But good written articles with links will give us backlinks and traffic as will we adding our rakings to the article directory ranking.

the sum of all is what we should look for. And not forget synergy.


I think the same is for ******** or nofollow links. Both are important, both should be target in our link campaign.

Note: you can replace "funny" with other words, it was just an example, but it apply to other kind of content.