Arrrrgg! Article Marketing Has Done Me Nothing For SEO

Do you have your actual site SEO'd? Are your pages optimized for your keywords, do you have your meta tags set up, page title, etc?

You said you have 3000 inbound links. Are these reciprocal, or one way? And how fast did you build these links? Sometimes if you get way too many inbound links in a short time, Google sees that as sort of spammy.

I don't know how many pages your site has, but do your have internal links from one page to the other?

These are just a few ideas. It is strange that your site dropped in the rankings.

Hope this helps!

Well most of my sites that ranked well I didn't do any promotion. Just on site SEO and the site did it itself. No article marketing nothing..Just practice good on site SEO and google should pick you up

It depends on how recent all of this activity was. If you have just recieved all the links recently, it might take a while for the spiders to crawl all the pages that your link is on and register them. Also, it is very possible for sites with half the amount of backlinks that you have to still outrank you for the keyword. The age of the domain and the age of the backlinks play a role in search engine positioning.

You are forgetting there are link and then links, not all links are created equal.

Are you competing for long tail phrases? Going after more competitive keywords?

Links are just a piece of the puzzle.

I am doing it for mainly shorter terms. Not sure what qualifies as a 'long tail' in my niche.. as all phrases are not super competitive.

Forget about the 200-300 links from these articles. Most of them are duplicates. You only really have link juice coming from 65 pages. These are the pages on which your articles were first discovered by the search engines.

Once a new article is published on an article directory, its PageRank is 0. It takes sometime for these pages to gain some PageRank, and that's when they start giving some power to the anchor text.

Also, I have heard that repeat anchor text/link coming from the same website doesn't have as much value as links scattered on several websites. So, here's what could've happened to you:

1. You submitted all of your articles to 100 article directories using FastSubmitArticles.com
2. ArticlesBase.com was the quickest directory to approve and publish all of your 65 articles, and therefore, your 65 articles were all discovered by search engines on ArticlesBase.com first. That would mean, in the eyes of Google, all that really counts for you is: 65 links coming from the same website!!

I myself just ordered 58 articles written for the same purpose of building anchor text. But here is my plan for distribution: I will make a list of 29 article directories with high Alexa rank and high PageRank. Then I will submit 2 articles to each one.

That way, Google might be tricked into thinking that I have different people writing different stuff about me and linking to me. Of course, these links also have to age and gain PageRank before they starting passing any link juice.

I hope that was helpful.

P.s. also, don't forget to check that the article directories that you are submitting to don't have a "nofollow" tag. Some article directories have started adding this tag, which renders your outbound links useless for link building.

Thanks a ton. So you're saying that ArticlesBase submits them to 65 search engines or something?

Ugh.. marketing can be a cluster___ sometimes.

I would also suggest switching up your anchor text. Include other variations, such as related keywords or "www.yourwebsite.com" or "click here", etc. Varying up the anchor text every now and then will make it look more natural, thus helping your rankings.

article marketing is saturated. even worse is so many of them are duplicate content so google doesnt rank them.