Is Article Marketing Still Valid? After the recent Google changes.

[Cyberdetective]

Hi

The recent changes effected by Google seem to have affected mainly so called "Content Farms". Are places like Ezinearticles, content farms? Well it appears Google seems to think so. This change seems to have affected search results on US based engines and could mean article marketing has lost it's power.

A LOT of pages that used to rank on the front page of google two or three days ago… now are nowhere to be found. And pages that previously didn’t seem to exist have popped up now on the front page.

So how were you affected?

Here are a few things I’ve noticed within the search realm of “mlm marketing“, “internet marketing” and “affiliate marketing“.

Ezinearticles, Buzzle and other major article directories have dropped significantly in the SERPS.
Squidoo and Hubpages have dropped significantly in the SERPS.
Authority sites like eHow and About.com have dropped significantly.
Which means article marketing – as we used to know it – simply is NOT working as well as it did last week.

The idea behind article marketing, previously, was to simply write great content and submit that content to an “authority site” (a site know to rank high on the SERPS) and promote that new page by getting a massive number of backlinks to the page. A week ago it worked like a charm. Today… many of these “authority sites” are no where to be found on the front page!

So where does that leave those that rely on submissions via Link Vine, UAW etc? I think it maybe time to adopt a different strategy.

Any thoughts anyone?

Regards
CD

[sreenivas]

There are changes which will takes places when ever Google algorithm changes, but that doesn't make article marketing irrelevant. If I understand the recent Google statement - it means it wants to give the user maximum value in listing than the publisher, means if someone searching for some info Google try to provide the best.

It means relevant content on directories will help only if they provide good valuable content not the rehashed one. Said so we may have to wait before come to conclusion on how Google behaves on the same content on different directories or same content in different formats and even those spinned!!

[Chris The Traffic Blogger]

Article reproduction is probably useless now, meaning that republishing the same article content on 10 sites won't be of value to you anymore.

[Jason Perez O'Connor]

Read this from Matt's blog:

This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.

Notice the word "might" which means they are probably still taking into consideration links from copied content, as some might still appear. I think what they are ultimately trying to do is source where the content was first written and display it in the SERPs over the websites that have got the same content.

They were already attempting this a while back, but maybe they've made a far more influential change this time round. Syndication is still going to be a huge part of Article Marketing, and I very much doubt it is going to have a negative effect on your site (other than the copied content having no chance ranking above or even on the same page as the original content; Which is how it should be anyway)

[rammonster]

Article marketing was mainly focused on getting your content syndicated on other sites, Seo articles just came around a few years back i guess...

[pavionjsl]

Originally Posted by sreenivas

There are changes which will takes places when ever Google algorithm changes, but that doesn't make article marketing irrelevant. If I understand the recent Google statement - it means it wants to give the user maximum value in listing than the publisher, means if someone searching for some info Google try to provide the best.

It means relevant content on directories will help only if they provide good valuable content not the rehashed one. Said so we may have to wait before come to conclusion on how Google behaves on the same content on different directories or same content in different formats and even those spinned!!

Ezine "original content articles" dropped big. This is not rehash stuff. SEO just changed.

[Jason Perez O'Connor]

Originally Posted by pavionjsl

Ezine "original content articles" dropped big. This is not rehash stuff. SEO just changed.

I promise you it did not drop because they are devaluing certain directories, trust me.

This whole algorithmic change has nothing to do with 'ANY' original content losing its ranking.

What I don't know is if they've added a better quality search function, so if these articles did not pass then they'd be brought down.

Could also be that many of those articles have not had any updates to the pages whilst other competitors have?

Anything but Google devaluing a websites value in general. Pages rank on their own, therefore the influence of a domain has no bearing on whether it ranks for a term or not (well mostly anyway, there are exceptions to this theory)

[Zachmo]

It has been more careful this time.