Has Article Marketing Become Redundant Post Panda?

It's been dead for ages in the way you described it.

Then again I've only submitted articles to directories in the hope of backlinks and traffic when I was new to it.

There is far more to article marketing than just putting them on directories.

Far more.

It seemed still working through article network like article marketing automation.

Dead? I still receive good traffic from EZA, in fact I don't think that there are any significant changes in traffic after the panda update, don't get a lot of traffic (3k visitors/month) but it seems as if these old articles still ranks pretty good.

But there is a lot more to article marketing than just posting. Alexa made an excellent post about it here

I totally agree that article directory did not help the cause for getting good traffic. Else there is a negative effect on your site ranking if you still do that, specially after the Panda update.

And it is quite obvious!

Yes, they have been.

They say so themselves, very openly.

But that's good for article marketers, not bad.

Taking all those article directory copies of our articles off the front page of Google's SERP's has made it very much easier for us to rank our own sites. It's all greatly, dramatically reduced the risk of our potential customer traffic swanning off to an article directory rather than coming to our own site (we all lose most of that traffic, so it's obviously the last thing we want!).

For many, many months, this forum's been full of threads in which professional article marketers are explaining how the various Panda updates have helped our businesses, and are continuing to.

So, if you've seen people saying that "article marketing" has suffered, or got worse, after the Panda updates, the comments you've been reading must have been written by people who haven't quite grasped the basics of what article directories are, what they're for, how they work, and how to use them. :rolleyes:

In other words, they've confused "article marketing" with "article directory marketing".

Article directory marketing - very unwisely attempting to use article directories for their own traffic and/or their own backlinks :rolleyes: - has been more or less dead since I've been online, 3 years ago. It is true that the Panda updates may have been the last nail in its already-firmly-closed coffin-lid. But that's not "article marketing".

Article marketing has of course been greatly assisted by the Panda updates. For all the obvious reasons, which are simply factual. In addition, it's also become much easier for us to use article directories for their intended purpose, maintaining all the benefits and avoiding all the (former) risks. And there are probably already 100 threads here in which many experienced, successful article marketers explain why and how, in quite some detail.

It depends what your intentions are, if you're using article marketing to build backlinks to your website pages / money page, then this is still very very highly effective as I am still seeing great value from using article marketing as the majority of my SEO.

However, if you are aiming for your articles themselves to rank then Panda has demolished this.

"Article Marketing" for me is a very broad term.

In the past, i got some *additional traffic directly from articles, but this was still when Ezine ranked for all kind of stuff. Thinking about it, i am actually GLAD that ezine and other article sites don't dominate the search engines anymore. It was simply unfair to any other, serious website owner!

Aside from the additional traffic from Ezine in the past, i only use and STILL USE "article marketing" for building links. In fact, i am using articles exclusively for links since i hardly use "garbage links" like blog comments and similar.

So..no matter what..Web2.0 sites, article directories, blogs etc....ALL of them need articles. And all of them have my links in it. This is "article marketing" for me and it is HIGHLY effective, ever was and still is, also after Panda. The fact that i see less "direct traffic" from article sites is really not relevant. What is relevant is how my sites rank.

It seems that article marketing is definitely alive and well, but needs to be used for syndication of content, rather than just pure backlinking strategies.

Thank you to all who have replied in this thread, and I hope you all enjoy a great end to this year, and an extremely prosperous new year.

I look forward to reading more of your thoughts on this subject.

I do not think article marketing has become redundant. Although some sites such as EZA have a lost of their power in terms of SEO, article marketing still has its place if done correctly.
I have found that unique and relevant articles, which are linked to one another as well as to your money site, and then backlinked with private blog networks, still provided tremendous SEO value.
Hope you find this info valuable.