When discussing SEO services and asking about the tools and methods an SEO specialist will use, you'll often hear the assurance that "we don't use pretzels." So what are these infamous SEO pretzels?
Methods that were considered effective just a few years ago to reach the top 10 search engine results may now be consigned to the dustbin of history as ineffective or downright harmful. Pretzels have already had their 5 minutes of fame. What's worth knowing about them?
What is Pretzel in the context of SEO?
Presell pages, or SEO pretzels, are websites where thematic articles are published, containing links leading to the website we are positioning.
This description might suggest that we're simply dealing with a thematic portal where you can purchase space to post your article. It sounds innocent enough… so what's the problem?
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Do these pretzels have any nutritional value?
Presell pages were created as an alternative to link farms. Google frowned upon pages consisting almost entirely of links, penalizing sites that utilized such support. The response to the stigma surrounding link farms was pretzels—pages consisting of links and accompanying text.
The texts created for such publications were relatively short (e.g., approximately 350 characters), thematically related to the client's offerings and the slogans promoted for them, saturated with keywords, and containing links. This was clearly a mass production – the keyword input was paramount, not high literary quality.
To minimize costs, the text ordered from the copywriter was subject to automatic synonymization (the process of replacing selected words with their equivalents, thus creating a new, non-duplicate text).
Thanks to this, a single text miraculously multiplied, while its quality, logic, and linguistic accuracy suffered. It's no wonder that pretzels quickly became a symbol of the lowest-quality content, where the only important thing was having a place to post a link. If someone happened to stumble upon these pretzels, they weren't the best representation of the company, product, or service they promoted.
Not all pretzels are the same
In an attempt to combat the negative image of pretzels, portals published articles with links, but they set expectations regarding their length, content, and accuracy. Before publication, articles had to be approved by the administrator, which allowed for the elimination of obvious synonymization.
These portals also pay close attention to their graphic design and thematic consistency (avoiding clustering texts on every topic). They also pay close attention to parameters such as citation flow and trust flow.
By increasing the length of the text, the keywords they contain are less conspicuous. However, such portals are not labeled as pretzels, which are associated with low-quality services.
FAQs about SEO Pretzels
"Pretzels" (from the English term Presell Pages) are short, usually low-quality texts written solely for search engine algorithms, rather than with the actual reader in mind. Their primary goal is to saturate the content with keywords and place a backlink to the positioned website.
No. By definition, these articles have very little educational or informational value. They are often mass-produced, sometimes using so-called synonyms, making them unnatural to read and providing users with no useful answers to their problems.
Pretzels are usually placed on specially created, free blogs and in so-called pretzel directories. These are usually very low-authority sites that serve solely as a resource for mass link generation.
Currently, this method has drastically lost its effectiveness and carries significant risk. Google algorithms (including Panda and Penguin) have been optimized to promote high-quality content and natural link profiles. Massive linking from low-quality links can be considered spam and result in a penalty (a drop in search results).
Instead of wasting time and money on low-quality pretzels, today's SEO recommends investing in valuable content marketing and white hat SEO activities. These include high-quality blog articles, comprehensive guides, substantive guest posts, and sponsored article publications on highly trusted sites with real traffic.
Summary
The above article covers the following topics:
- SEO pretzels are low-quality presell pages used to publish simple articles with SEO links, which are now considered an outdated method and potentially harmful to a website's ranking.
- SEO pretzels are low-quality texts generated en masse through synonymization, which only serve to smuggle links and provide no substantive value to the reader.
- More professional websites publishing texts with links distance themselves from the "pretzel" label by ensuring the substantive correctness of the content, the aesthetics of the website and high quality parameters, such as Trust Flow.
