Before getting to the main point, let's muse on backlinking, shall we?

OK, so it's official: Inbound links are important, maybe not as important as quality content, but important nonetheless.

Based on recent testing, it seems "on-page SEO" is a waste of time beyond covering the obvious bases. Get your keywords in the url, the title, the meta description, the alt tags, the headers and in the content body. Nowadays, you don't even have to worry too much about exact-match key phrases; Natural Language Processing has come a long way. The search engines will get the idea if you use related terms, phrases, and concepts. Create coherent content, avoiding spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors, and the on-page SEO takes care of itself for the most part.

The bugger is that votes from the rest of the web (a.k.a. backlinks) still count for a darn lot, even when they're not even really votes from the rest of the web. The "election" is often rigged by webmasters with the financial or spamming resources to buy or place natural looking backlinks. Truly viral content acts as a trip-wire on that phenomenon. It seems the search engines are good at spotting truly popular stuff. One semi-viral page will crush any spam link building that your competitors might do, even for a period of years. This has been my experience anyway.

Now for the main show...

So-called "article marketing" is, for the moment, the most real viral simulation.

If you place an article with links back to your site on ten article directories and it gets picked up by a handful of blogs, those links seem to count for something. Occasionally, you will even get high-authority inbound links when well established web publications use the content you have provided to article directories.

Additionally, the articles on the major directories are vetted for quality by human editors, and that seems to count for something in the SERPs.

Here is the dilemma: There are hundreds of article directories. Your competitors are "spinning"* their articles and using software (affiliate link) to submit to all the directories. That's almost the definition of spammy behavior that would be frowned upon by the Pure Ones on their golden thrones at the Googleplex, right? I mean, using a 'bot to do anything but crawl for indexing is evil, right? Think about it.

So is it wrong to try to pull a fast one on the Googlebot and stuff the ballot box with spun links sprayed all over creation? I'm of the opinion that there is nothing wrong with it for the following reasons:

• I'm proud of my content and consider it to be of high value, at least compared to what some of my "competitors" produce. Why should I let myself get pushed around by spammy link builders? Sometimes it only makes sense to fight fire with fire. Plus, I happen to believe that I would be doing the world a disservice if I let my awesome content get buried like that. Yeah, I have ego issues that sometimes border on delusions of grandeur. Sue me.
• I would do this even if search engines did not exist. The more links in, the more traffic, search engines or no. Do you fault a Chinese restaurant for posting its menu on your doorknob every once in a while? Yeah, it's a little bit of a nuisance, especially if you already have a copy in your "delivery menu" file, but business is business. The business that does not get out there and hustle, even at the risk of being a little annoying, goes down. So, yes, it's OK to send your articles out there, even spin them. It's called promotion, and it is the Great American Way. Suck it if you have a problem with that, you godless commie.
• It is an act of generosity. I'm handing out free content like a lion tamer hands out steak. What's wrong with that? Spread the love.
• There is nothing wrong with making money. We don't give those articles away because we're gunning for sainthood, and neither do our competitors. When I say "we," I mean those of us who use the article marketing tool. (affiliate link)
• 'tis the Lesser of Evils. You know the link building that ticks me off? Profile spam and blog comment spam. What a pain in the neck! At least the people who run the article directories want your content and -- in most cases -- check it out to make sure it's up to a certain standard.
• Inbound links will always be important. Google might get good at squashing the most obviously spammy links, but they will never be able to remove this factor from the algorithm: Content people like and share can be assumed to have value.

Backlinking is important. Article directories are asking for the articles. It's a game of skill, not luck. Your competitors are doing it. You would be a fool not to do it... unless the search engines decide to start smacking people down over it, and I see no signs of that happening.

There is nothing wrong with aggressive article marketing, and until something else proves more effective (or article marketing proves ineffective), I'm going to keep doing it. You, obviously, will have to make up your own mind.

(DISCLAIMER: This information comes with no warranty. If you get your sites banned, it's on you, not me.)