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Book Review & Contest Insights from Real Reviews and Submissions
What separates great books from the rest? Below are articles with insights from real reviews and contest submissions—what works, what doesn’t, and how to improve your book. You’ll also find a wide range of articles covering writing, publishing, marketing, and more. Each article has a Comments section so you can read advice from other authors and leave your own.
Why Some Books Win Awards (And Most Don’t) — Insights From Real Contest Submissions New!
What separates award-winning books from the rest? After evaluating contest submissions across a wide range of genres, certain patterns become clear. Some books consistently rise to the top. Others, even with strong ideas and clear effort behind them, fall short. The difference is rarely dramatic—it...
What We’ve Learned From Reviewing Hundreds of Thousands of Books (And Why Most Don’t Stand Out) New!
After reviewing and evaluating books across thousands of submissions over the past two decades, certain patterns become impossible to ignore. Some books immediately stand out to reviewers. Others—even well-intentioned ones—fade into the middle or fall short. The difference is rarely luck. It comes down to...
How to Avoid Black Hat SEO
Never forget that black hat SEO techniques will leave your website exposed to penalties and unprotected in the event of algorithmic changes. At all costs these particular techniques should be avoided. There are certain methods you can use to avoid them; just keep in mind that these methods are to be used in the short-term and not the long-term, otherwise they'll have long-lasting negative impact on your website.
Anchor text link building strategies
It is now inadvisable to use a keyword as anchor text. It has been flagged as a blatant attempt to manipulate search engine rankings. A high percentage of exact match anchor text links can result in a Penguin penalty from which it is notoriously difficult to recover. Your website can be devalued with inbound links from low quality pages and will eventually impact you negatively. So be very careful as lots of ads, poor quality material and much content but low traffic could indicate that a particular website isn't a good back link opportunity. It can hurt your website.
Syndication Elements
At one time article syndication was a common SEO practice. This took care of the quantity of link building, but it ignored quality. It's the practice of taking content and spinning it off to distribute to lots of different websites. So keep in mind that taking poor quality articles and passing them off as valuable content that should be read or linked to is not good at all for long term SEO. Also, when detected, your website will definitely suffer for it.
Run From Duplicates
A well-known SEO best practice is to avoid duplicate content. However there are still people who copy and spin content in order to hit most valued keywords as much as possible. What happens is that search engine algorithms can detect this duplicated content easily, and as a result of which the websites that make use of this method suffer the consequences. So it is best to provide original and unique content that is likely to be used and shared, indicating to search engines that it's worthy and relevant.
Black Hat Won't Work
Therefore no matter what else you do, black hat SEO techniques are not the way to get more traffic to your website. You will be penalized and your website will suffer. Even though these methods might produce some short-term rewards in the long-run, they will hurt your website and that is what you want to avoid at all costs. After all, there are many methods you can use to increase traffic to your website which won't hurt it and that is the better way to go about it.