Wanna know what to do since the big fat Google Panda pimp slapped the article directories?

30 replies
Look guys and gals,

We all know that the traditional article marketing method that everyone has been taught is quickly becoming an obsolete method of getting traffic.

This is primarily due to the Google Panda( a.k.a Farmer) update reducing the amount of listings it has in its search engine results pages from the top article directories by significant percentages.

We've all seen the Sistrix graphs, read the blog posts, seen the case studies, and have had to suffer through thread after countless thread about what people should do now since the traditional methods are in jeopardy of becoming obsolete.

So what should we do now?

The way forward is to stop giving all of your quality content away to article directories and actually posting it to your own properties exclusively.

I always thought it was an extremely dumb idea to build up another person's business for the pittance of a few clicks here and there.

I've seen people brag that they write X articles per day, and have XXXX published in EZA. I want to slap them upside the head and tell them how stupid they are for doing it.

You're getting clicks yea, but your content is being prostituted out by the article directory pimps.

They surround your articles with 20-30 advertising links, and all they allow you to have is 2-3 links, ON YOUR OWN CONTENT!

I cringe when I see postings where people are ecstatic when they achieve an article CTR of 25% or something equally pathetic.

I mean how dumb is that?

Think about how much your own site would be considered an authority if it had X,XXX unique content articles published to it.

How much Google PR would it have?

How many top search engine listings?

What would your CTR be if all of the traffic was only exposed to YOUR affiliate links, instead of you having fight an uphill battle with the article directories intrusive Adsense blocks everywhere?

Here's my proposed solution:

-Choose a profitable niche

-Pick an affiliate program(s) in that niche, and/or create your own product for that niche

-Create your own blog

-Post in-depth high quality content to your blog exclusively, recommend related products via banner ads, and extremely sparse promotional posts.

Then become an active participant in your niche by doing these things:

---Join niche forums, contribute to the conversation, answer questions, be helpful, and signature market your blog on them.

---When you post a new article on your site, post the first 300-500 words as a forum posting and then direct them to your blog to read the rest.

---Join Twitter and build up a targeted following there.

---Tweet every time you post a in-depth article to your blog.

---Participate in the conversation on Twitter, especially on any tweet having to do with your niche.

---Make your articles into videos and build up a Youtube channel, watermark your URL in all your videos, and put your blog URL in the description.

---Join Facebook groups related to your niche, participate in the groups, and promote your blog there.

---Create a Facebook fanpage for your blog, get likes, and post status updates every time you make an in-depth posting to your blog.


I've been doing this same strategy in 4 different niches, I get tons of traffic to my sites, I have no problem making money, and I could care less what Google decides to do with their stupid algorithm.

Do you know why?

Because I create my content for the people in my niche, not for some soulless search engine software crawler robot endlessly looping on some server sitting in Google's basement.

I address the problems they are having, give them solutions via my content, and recommend products that will help them even more.

Doing this makes your business Google immune, because you don't care if you get any traffic from them.

More often than not you will start getting a lot of traffic from them anyways, because if your content is good, people will link to it without you even having to ask them to do so.

Also, you're primarily marketing on some of the most highly trafficked websites out there besides Google, where you can interact with and help actual people, not software robots!

Last time I checked, people have money, not pieces of algorithmic code sitting inside of computers.

Honestly, if you're aggressive you can get thousands of unique visitors per day like this.

The key for the whole thing to work is to make your blog posts extremely in-depth and of a very high quality to actual people.

Here's an example in a niche we can all relate to.

The subject is making money online.

Here's a traditional article marketing piece of content (# of words: 432 ):

http://ezinearticles.com/?Make-Money...its&id=6026065

Now ask yourself if you were looking for a real solution to help you get started making money online, is this piece of content really helpful?

And even if you did find it helpful, look at the insane amount of advertising the poor saps two little resource box links have to compete with.

Seriously, what percentage of the traffic that lands on this page is actually going to click on his links?

I counted 120 total links on that one webpage...and only TWO are linking to this guy's stuff!

That's just ridiculous, and I hope you can really see just how insane submitting your content that you slaved to create to these article marketing content pimps really is.

On the flipside, here is a high quality in-depth post by a well known marketer who is obviously using this method (# of words: 1,527):

A Profit Model That Almost Never Fails | Jason Fladlien's Blog

See how this guy actually gives some useful content.

Notice how each and every last link on that site goes to something that he either owns outright or will directly profit from.

That's right. What you've just seen is someone who is interested in building his own internet business and not the business of some content pimp article directory owner.

He has created an actual internet asset that has real value, both to him, and his customers and visitors who access his site.

What do you think his CTR is?

How much money do you think this one blog post funnels into his pockets?

Because he took the time to give an actual solution, instead of just writing for clicks or backlinks, I can guess its probably a decent amount.


So the solution to "beating" the Google Panda/Farmer update is to stop worrying about gaming the search engines!

Forget SEO, keyword density, LSI, mass submissions, slow submissions, content spinning, forum profile links, PR8 .edu links, link juice, link wheels, XML sitemaps, ping lists, comment spamming, and all of that other crap!

While some of that stuff may make you some short term earnings, in the end you aren't really focusing on an income producing activity that is going to build your own business for long term profits.

The solution is to create real internet assets by stuffing them full of great in-depth high quality content, that gives solutions to real problems, that real people are actually having.

You make money in all forms of business by filling a need and asking for money for doing so, and internet marketing is no different.

So take some action right now!


Hope this was helpful to someone,

-Claude
#article #big #directories #fat #google #panda #pimp #slapped #wanna
  • Profile picture of the author PMinc
    That was an awesome post, Claude. What I liked best about it was how you pointed out that people place far too much emphasis on all the latest crap:

    "Forget SEO, keyword density, LSI, mass submissions, slow submissions, content spinning, forum profile links, PR8 .edu links, link juice, link wheels, XML sitemaps, ping lists, comment spamming, and all of that other crap!"


    I will say however, that posting to article farms does help with link juice, but in the end, with the latest slap the value of those links will very likely diminish.

    Hopefully some other warriors will take this post to heart.
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  • Profile picture of the author esk
    yeah mate, great post. Forget all the seo and stuff. Provide the best quality and value to your visitors and google will like your page
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  • Profile picture of the author theantihype
    Based on what you said prior and the following statement:

    Originally Posted by TrafficGuy Claude View Post

    Forget SEO, keyword density, LSI, mass submissions, slow submissions, content spinning, forum profile links, PR8 .edu links, link juice, link wheels, XML sitemaps, ping lists, comment spamming, and all of that other crap!
    I'm assuming that you are a big proponent of social media.
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    • Profile picture of the author TrafficGuy Claude
      Originally Posted by theantihype View Post

      Based on what you said prior and the following statement:

      I'm assuming that you are a big proponent of social media.
      I'm definitely for social media. Its the easiest way to touch base with the actual people in your niche.

      As long as you participate in the conversation and contribute quality content, it automatically lends itself to you establishing massive amounts of creditability.

      Once people know, like, and trust you, they will buy anything you ask them to.

      It's far easier for me to make money like this as opposed to worrying about all of the technical crap that goes into playing the SEO game.
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      • Profile picture of the author drmani
        Claude, LOVED this post - and have saved it to print out and read every now and then.

        Thank you for sharing this valuable advise.

        All success
        Dr.Mani
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        • Profile picture of the author Jason Fladlien
          Claude,

          thanks for using my blog as an example - I really appreciate it. And you're dead on with your assessments. While it's much slower to build a blog like mine in terms of getting traffic than submitting an article to a directory... over time it has been a far, far more profitable exercise and time investment
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  • Profile picture of the author Mly2000
    FANTASTIC.

    and here i was thinking building a website around my idea of actually making a REAL website, was all bogus, stupid, stuff.
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  • Yes, and people from forums like this one will make posts like this linking back to your own blog, and giving you more exposure.

    You don't get that with article directories... Well, not much...
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  • Profile picture of the author Linda_C
    Bravo - well said!! Not much words needed, just kudos earned. lol
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    • Profile picture of the author hyderkhan
      This is a great post, advocating the use of social media to promote your website instead of SEO.

      I agree 100% that it is insane to post your articles to a self-serving article directory. But the fact is that many people are doing this as part of an SEO strategy for building backlinks.

      Your post seems to imply that we should forget about SEO and focus on social marketing instead. I think that we shouldn't necessarily abandon SEO altogether, but work on refining our SEO strategies to not include these article directories.

      I think that regardless of whether or not we write to article directories or not, or focus on SEO or not, we all should definitely start incorporating social media into our back linking campaigns.

      We don't want to be at the mercy of the Big G, or at the mercy of the article directories.

      Great post!


      PS: You mentioned that instead of posting 1000 articles to some article directory, we should post those same 1000 articles as blog posts to our own blogs eg) Wordpress blogs.

      Here is a follow up question to that:

      Is it possible to increase your own search engine ranking by creating a 1000-post blog?? When Google comes crawling my website and sees that it has hundreds or thousands of pages on it.... it has 100s of INTERNAL backlinks, but not as many EXTERNAL backlinks, will that work from an SEO perspective?
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      • Profile picture of the author tpw
        Originally Posted by hyderkhan View Post

        We don't want to be at the mercy of the Big G, or at the mercy of the article directories.

        Any time you find your business completely at the mercy of a third-party provider, you are in essence a slave to that provider, since you are forced to cow to their demands, rather than to do what is right for your business. :p
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  • Profile picture of the author rammonster
    Great minds really do think alike...I was about to make a similar thread addressing a similar issue and proposing the same solution. I even gave it a nice catchy title:

    "Don't let Google slap you again - Google proof yourself"

    But I like the whole PIMP thing better...lol. Very well said. Stop writing for Google and start writing for yourself! This is one of the reasons why I stopped writing for directories now. I made the mistake of writing my articles simply for feeding the search engines and maybe get a few clicks and visitors in the process. Didn't work out too well for me.

    But I learned my lesson the hard way and I don't plan on following the same route again. Thanks for putting this out here dude.

    Cheers,
    kunal
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  • Profile picture of the author cheerios2009
    Great post Claude. I really like the idea that if we stop giving the article directories our content, we are giving ourselves more power to our own sites in the end.

    Since this change in Googles algorithm many of my blogs are seeing better rankings. I focus on my on-page SEO and that seems to help. I've seen my posting get ranked in minutes on the first page. That doesn't always mean they stay there of course, but recently I have been checking and in come cases they are sticking on the first page.

    I do believe article directories can still be helpful for backlinks and also helpful in getting people to come to know our sites. I have one particular blog that has earned over $400.00 in Adsense due to only a few articles I wrote and submitted to EA. However, I'm sure that due to the recent change that article will not have the same ranking or traffic as it had before.

    I think we're going to have to pay attention and simply keep up with the change. The change is good for those of us providing quality and it's even BETTER news to know that these crappy sites are getting deleted. I still see them, but I'm sure they will continue to deminish over time.


    Chrisi
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    • Profile picture of the author hyderkhan
      Now here's one question I am wondering about, ever since the whole Google slap against the article directories:

      There are two ways to use article directories:

      #1. You want your articles themselves to rank in the SERPS.

      #2. You are only using your articles to serve as BACKLINKS to your own site.

      Did Google's recent slap affect BOTH of these uses?


      And how does participating in discussion forums and posting comments on other people's blogs compare, from a backlinking SEO perspective, compared to writing articles?

      (If posting 100 do-follow forum comments or forum discussion questions at 50 words a piece is less time consuming but offers just as much SEO backlinking power as article marketing does, then it definitely sounds like we have a winner here!)
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      • Profile picture of the author tpw
        Originally Posted by hyderkhan View Post

        There are two ways to use article directories:

        #1. You want your articles themselves to rank in the SERPS.

        #2. You are only using your articles to serve as BACKLINKS to your own site.

        Did Google's recent slap affect BOTH of these uses?

        In short, yes.

        I would tell you that there are more than two ways to use article directories, but many people seem to be tired of hearing about the other options.
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        • Profile picture of the author hyderkhan
          Originally Posted by tpw View Post


          I would tell you that there are more than two ways to use article directories, but many people seem to be tired of hearing about the other options.
          I would love to hear them....
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          • Profile picture of the author tpw
            Originally Posted by hyderkhan View Post

            Originally Posted by hyderkhan View Post

            There are two ways to use article directories:

            #1. You want your articles themselves to rank in the SERPS.

            #2. You are only using your articles to serve as BACKLINKS to your own site.

            I would tell you that there are more than two ways to use article directories, but many people seem to be tired of hearing about the other options.

            I would love to hear them....

            3. Internal traffic at the article directories. Some people browse their favorite directories internally, looking for information.

            4. Syndication from the article directory. Article directories were originally created to be a repository for ezine publishers, webmasters and bloggers to find content worthy of putting into their publications and sites. People still do that.

            When they find content worthy of reprint and content they feel will be of value to their readers, they will copy it to their properties and make it available to their readers.

            The goal with syndication is pretty straight forward. You want to impress one publisher who will in turn make your content available to hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of additional readers.

            (You can actually gain the first two on another person's website, once your article has been syndicated.)



            Syndication of my content is my number one goal. Everything else is just a bonus.
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            • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
              Because I create my content for the people in my niche, not for some soulless search engine software crawler robot endlessly looping on some server sitting in Google's basement.
              This may be the most important sentence in the whole long, very informative post. I've been saying it for years, and I'm really happy to hear more people say it.

              Well done...
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    • Profile picture of the author PMinc
      Alternative to Article sites: Mutual Content Site Circles

      Why don't more people team up with others in their niches to buy up domains and create co-op sites where people post what they would otherwise post in directories on these sites?

      Everyone pitches in, and with enough hands on board, these site grow quickly in content.

      Everyone agrees to keep the content unique, and soon enough you have targeted backlinks to your main site.

      Also...

      I'm still new to using Facebook as a marketing tool and was wondering if anyone has had experience with any of the "LIKE buyers" on this list:

      Buy Facebook Likes
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  • Profile picture of the author JMCM
    Wow. What an excellent post. Very informative. Thank-you so much.
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  • Profile picture of the author GeorgeReed
    Excellent post. Thank god content farms are ruined is all im going to say. lets make the internet a better place for everyone.
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  • Profile picture of the author clever7
    Very interesting post! I don’t know if I could really follow your thoughts. I agree with some of them, but I can’t say that I totally agree with everything you say. Google’s change slapped content thieves and content distorters. Only low quality articles lost their ranking. High quality articles submitted to EZA are still being displayed in the first results page.

    I’m glad I have already submitted more than 1100 articles to EZA and I’ll keep submitting my articles to EZA forever. I would never become known so fast without all the traffic I have from my articles. And as Tpw observed, there are more benefits than just getting traffic from your articles (like syndication and regular readers) when you submit your articles to article directories.

    I’m only having advantages with Google’s search algorithm changes. My very old articles are still sending regular traffic to my websites, besides the new ones.

    Most internet users’ immune system is already quite strong before ads. They don’t even notice their existence. As soon as they land in a web page, their eyes go directly to the article’s first paragraph.
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    • Profile picture of the author hyderkhan
      So if article marketing for back links is not a good long term strategy (but it may still be if your goal is to get your articles syndicated).....

      ... how about those blog network services such as:


      - Linkvana
      - FreeTrafficSystem


      These services take your articles and distribute them on relevant blogs.

      Is this still a viable strategy?
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  • Profile picture of the author TrafficGuy Claude
    @hyderkhan: I think you missed the main point of my original post. The idea is to forget about creating content for SEO purposes and create for the users.

    The only reason you'd need backlinks is to increase your position in the SERPS, which are very volatile and completely outside of your control.

    The blog network idea is slightly better, but you're still giving away your content to others, and from user perspective who wants to site on a site with a bunch of 250-400 word "articles" that are useless and add little to no value to the internet experience.

    Sure these blog networks may get traffic, and sure you'd get a lot of backlinks to your website, but all the time you've invested into doing so could be spent better in other places.

    You'd be better off finding the top 5-10 most highly trafficked and popular blogs in your niche and offering to write a high quality in-depth post for them as a guest poster, and then having a link back to your site.

    Remember, everyone only has 24 hours per day, so you want to be doing the things that are going to build your business and add value to your assets over the long term.

    My model is to quit playing the SEO game altogether, take a customer centric approach to my internet marketing business, and build a true asset that is immune to wild swings in the search engines.

    I mean think about it for a minute, what if Google stops using backlinks as the primary way it ranks websites?

    What would all those hours of writing, spinning, submitting, and playing the SERPs game really be worth at that point?

    Absolutely nothing.

    Don't even get me started on the wasted capital that you would have invested in all of the tools and software that facilitate all of the aforementioned tasks.

    Look, it might seem ridiculous right now, but I can remember when meta tags and keyword targeted URLs where the main ranking factor for the SERPs.

    Back in those days, people spent hours and hours creating sites with thousands of pages just to get search engine traffic, but like everything else, Google and Yahoo slapped it and it wasn't viable any more.

    This could easily happen with backlinks too, and I predict that it probably will in the next year or two.

    Instead of spending time building backlinks, wouldn't it be better to make yourself more visible in your niche market by participating in the conversation on niche forums, niche blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube?

    If you reference your high quality content in your social activities you will quickly be seen as an expert, and people will trust your knowledge.

    Also, you'll get a lot of traffic because when your stuff is good, people talk about it, and they share it.

    At this point, SEO takes care of itself at this point because you get a ton of people linking to your post, your site PR grows, and SERPS increase by themselves.

    Finally the people in your niche will also know who you are because they see your name on all the sites they go to, and as long as you're not an ***hole in your activities people will like you as well.

    Combine that massive creditability together with traditional internet marketing concepts like building a subscriber list and creating products that provide for wants and solve the needs of the people in your niche...

    You then have a complete formula for internet marketing success.
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    • Profile picture of the author James Schramko
      This was all discussed many years ago. Check out the heated
      defense of the misguided article marketing brigade:

      http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ver-rated.html

      Build on someone else's platform pay the price.

      Building valuable assets that YOU control whilst creating real
      value for customers was always the smartest idea.
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      • Profile picture of the author dbarnum
        Heads up, unless I've missed this in other posts above (speed reading does that)! One very important value that many people - -me included - find in top article directories is the content for personal and business reasons, just want to point this out.

        Before I was even into web marketing big time, I headed there for information. I read all of Willie Crawford's articles and those of many other IMers out there, to learn the ropes, learn about new products, services marketing methods, etc. Even today I still head to directories for writers' columns: Willies, Steve Wagenheim's, and many other Warriors.

        So let's not forget a real value there.

        Sure the content is great on your own personal sites, but if I don't know you or a special site or blog you may have your content on, etc., odds are I'd find you in the article directories. Advertising / Marketing 101 Directories are the most convenient places to look - for specific content plus linked pages for follow up. I mean that's what it's all about, right? Yep, we're all buyers, too!

        Yes, publish another version or the original version on your site(s) somewhere, but reach out so people - not just search engines - can find you. This is important!
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  • Profile picture of the author Barry Unruh
    I love the other example of great article writing you used....a 1200 word Original Post on the Warrior Forum filled with passion, opinion, and great value.
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  • Profile picture of the author Frank Marker
    I haven't had any problems with Article Marketing directories since the update. I guess this is because it was, as you say, a 'pimp slap'. I suppose if you liken Google to a pimp dishing out slaps, it because you liken yourself to prostitutes who need to be kept in check by the slap-happy pimp Big Daddy G.

    Effectively using Article Marketing directories hasn't changed. One particular method that everyone knew must come to end one day, has come to an end. Many will flee (and good riddance) others will remain. Those who stay behind will not be missing out on anything.
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  • Profile picture of the author richeerich
    At the end of the day, it's night ; )
    And at the end of Google's day they are just trying to maintain a relevant search engine for users so they keep coming back, therefore maintaining Google's dominance. As a marketer it's great to have so many potential clients coming to one place, makes the job easier to snare. So as this post says keep it relevant so the client will like, enjoy and benefit and more will come, either through Google or word of mouth so to speak. Nice post!
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  • Profile picture of the author Michelle Strait
    Originally Posted by TrafficGuy Claude View Post


    Forget SEO, keyword density, LSI, mass submissions, slow submissions, content spinning, forum profile links, PR8 .edu links, link juice, link wheels, XML sitemaps, ping lists, comment spamming, and all of that other crap!

    I can't even imagine not doing most of those things. However, I'm going to try because all that stuff takes the enjoyment out of my job. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. :-)
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