I came acrosss a good article by Glenn Murray at http://www.divinewrite.com about How to Beat Google’s Dampening Link Filter with SEO Articles. Here is the extract.

Most Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts agree that back links to your website have a great impact on your ranking in the major search engines. Think of it like voting; your site is a candidate and every link to your site counts as a vote. Of course, it was never quite that simple (high ranking, relevant sites have more voting power) but now it may have gotten even more complicated.

The Dampening Link Filter

Google appears to have introduced something called a “Dampening Link Filter” into its indexing algorithm. I’ll give you a layman’s overview of this filter, but for more intimate details, you check out WebProNews article at

http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/searchinsider/wpn-49-20050407GooglesNewLinkFilter.html#google.

Importance of links back to your site (or “backlinks”) is very much important for success in search engine ranikings like Google. For some time, many companies have been engaging in all sorts of link campaigns designed to generate thousands of backlinks. Many of these techniques haven’t really paid too much attention to the context or lifespan of these links. And Google knows it well. These campaigns are designed to artificially generate the perception of a site’s importance – to trick the search engines into thinking that they are important – however, Google has decided to put an end to it. Apparently, Google has introduced a new link filter to dampen the effect of new backlinks. So if your link generation campaign has just created hundreds of links in 2-3 days from apparently irrelevant sites, Google will suspect it of being artificial, and refuse to pass on the full effect of those links – at least for sometime. Well, that’s how the theory goes, anyway.

Some people argue that you can avoid being penalized by this filter by generating links:

1. more slowly;
2. from relevant sites; and
3. which have a long lifespan.

The wisdom of relevance and lifespan is already well established; the dampening filter is simply one more reason why people should pay attention to it. Writing and submitting SEO articles for publication is one way to do so.

This article explains how the three conditions are satisfied by SEO articles. For the basics of SEO article writing, take a look at How to Top Google by Writing Articles at

http://www.divinewrite.com/seoarticles.htm

Build Backlinks Slowly

Writing quality articles takes time. It’s as simple as that. Even an SEO copywriter can’t just bang an article together in a morning – it has to be well considered. It must be accurate, informative, interesting, well written, and topical. And once you’ve written the article, the real work begins. You then have to submit it to your favourite article submit sites. And as they all have different requirements and idiosyncrasies, submitting your article to 50 submit sites can take you all day!

Once submitted, even the best articles will only be published gradually. A good article can be published 2 or 3 times a day for a week or two, then interest tapers off. But still, over the course of 6 months a single good article can be published hundreds of times! And remember, each time is a link.

Building Backlinks From Relevant WebSites

When you decide the topic of your article, you also define the type of article website that will publish it. All online publishers have one main goal to generate traffic. Whether for commercial or other reasons, they want particular kinds of articles for very specific audiences. Your article won’t be published on irrelevant sites simply because the publishers of those sites get no benefit out of it.

Of course, your article may be published on sites that are  marginally relevant. For instance, this article may be published on general copywriting websites, web design websites, advertising websites, , home business websites, etc. But the importance of a well written SEO article is that you get to optimize it for the keywords that you want to rank for. So even if the keywords on the publishing site don’t  match much your own target keywords, the page containing your link (i.e. your article) will do the trick.

Moreover, you even have the power to optimize the links themselves. For instance, as an SEO copywriter, I can distribute backlinks throughout my article that use my target keywords as the link text (e.g. Google Success, SEO for Google, Google Search Engine Optimization, and Google Adwords ;-). Some submit sites don’t let you do this, but most will.

And one more thing – other websites link to good articles. This can increase the Page Rank of the publishing site containing your article, which, in turn, can increase the page rank of your own website. It’s a win-win situation.

Building Backlinks With a Long Lifespan

The quality of your SEO article determines the lifespan of your backlink. If you write a very helpful or important article, make it easy to read, and choose a topic which isn’t going to fade away soon, your article will stay online for years.

In any event, most publishers do not clear out their article libraries simply because it’s better for them to have lots of content available to both search engines as well as readers.

Conclusion

While it’s no new phenomenon to SEO veterans and Search Engine Optimization firms, the writing of SEO articles to generate backlinks is a very good tactic which offers much in the way of ranking. And even if the Google’s recent algorithm has a builf-in dampening link filter, it will simply be in your favour and increases your site’s Google pagerank.