Is Facebook note now better than article directories?

Google has done article marketers a lot of favors, in 2011-2013, as a result of which it's now a little easier for us to use article directories for the purpose for which they're intended.

First, all those Panda updates destroyed the SEO potential of article directories (not very nice for the directories themselves, of course, but very convenient for us article marketers, because we can now put all our articles in Ezine Articles without worrying about those copies outranking the copies originally published and indexed on our own sites - that's a huge advantage! ), and that's taken away a lot of the people who were trying to use them "for SEO", in the mistaken belief that it might help them to rank articles in directories (this was only ever based on a very fundamental misunderstanding, of course, but at one time it was quite a widespread misunderstanding! So, those people have rather been "cleared out of our way").

And then after that, along came all those Penguin updates, which severely penalized people who had used "mass automated submission software", submitted to multiple article directories (never a sensible thing to do, of course), and generally not understood that article marketing has nothing to do with SEO. Those "players" have effectively also been removed from the field of play.

Google's also gone to some lengths to clarify the differences between "duplicate content" and "syndicated content", and so on.

So it's a bit easier for us.

It's a little easier for publishers to find the quality content they seek (which is good for us, too, of course), and there are fewer and fewer of them, now, who worry about what they mistakenly thought was "duplicate content", and "SEO penalties for it" and all the rest of the nonsense, and that's good for us, too. It's become a bit less competitive (though to be honest most of the "competition" was so misguided as not to be much of a "threat" anyway).

In 2009/10, when I was doing "guest posting" on people's blogs, I sometimes encountered webmasters who imagined that it would be a problem for them to syndicate guest posts which had already been published elsewhere online, but nowadays that's a real rarity for me. People have listened to Google (and the fact that so many recent SEO textbooks have also clarified this has helped, too), and moved on from all those silly, tired, old arguments and worries. They just want high-quality content that's new and original to their readers, and they mostly understand that Google sees the need for that, too, and welcomes it.

And of course, the total content of the web is always growing, too - so there are more places to syndicate content to than there ever used to be.

So, all in all, I'd certainly say that 2014's a better time to be starting article marketing than 2009 was.

Article marketing has existed since long before the internet. Since the internet's been available, "article directory marketing" (trying to use article directories for their own traffic and/or their own useless backlinks) has come and gone ... but article marketing itself continues unabated. Some methods are timeless.

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