The Death of Article Marketing

As always, we will have to change and adapt with the times. Besides it's a lot easy to declare a war then prosecute one. In the end I think sticking to some fundamental rules will see you through.

-Write high quality content that has actual value.
-Submit only to respected article directories, not blast it out to thousands.
-Make sure articles only represent a part of your overall seo strategy.

If the 'Death of Article marketing' or the 'Death of xyz' is somthing you fear, then...

have we learnt anything?

DONT PUT ALL YOUR EGGS IN ONE BASKET, as far as Traffic generation is concerned.

You should always have as many traffic sources and experiment with differerent ways to get traffic to your sites. So if one goes down, then there are others to fall back on.

I hope your predictions are right kindsvater.

No more autoblogs? No more crappy ezine articles? No more low quality articles from people with no passion for the subject?

Geez, how are we gonna do without this?

Autoblogs are DEFINITELY going to be biting the dust. Steer clear from autoblogging software. These are going to be flagged as spam in a heartbeat! Big waste of time and money...

Well... I'm not sure if article marketing will die but I believe there is always something new coming out that will turn things around... there are just too many B.S about certain online strategies that's going to end... but did it really end... no... I mean... there are still people doing cold calling....

"- Articles will need to be longer. Are you trying to get by with "300 word" articles as if that were some magic number. 299 words and you're in trouble, but 301 and you're fine? I expect one algorithm change will demand more content."

Yes, this is precisely why I've been a very strong proponent of longer articles, for many other reasons as well. Those platforms that actually incentivize longer articles will do the best online.

as long as you write (or you have other people write) good content, readable for humans, everybody is going to be fine. Article marketing is there to stay. the longer the article (500-600 words) are better.

Care to elaborate on this? How can we do this?

Up my game FTW YEHHHH

This is why I personally like to rely more on social networks like Facebook and Twitter as opposed to organic search engine rankings.

Google can get cruel, really cruel.

I write quality articles; these changes won't have any effect. If you focus on quality, none of this crap is a big deal. It gets very tiring listening to people try to stir the same empty pot whenever Google burps.

In my opinion, it's largely been in Internet marketing circles that 300 words is even considered an "article."

something is always dieing/old/doesn't work anymore. People always find a new something or keep using the "dead" something. Life goes on

why is there another post about this?

This change will only hurt people that call themselves article marketers but were never truly implementing what the real essence is behind being successful with articles.

For every 10 people it impacts in a negative manner there will be 2 or 3 that actually see a positive result form this new change.

Marketers like Alexa and Bill Platt will reap the rewards from this while the 250 word article strafing or drive by shooter will see a huge negative impact.

I'm personally all for the change and I think EZA was expecting this which is why they were pushing for longer articles late last year.

Incidently, a marketer named Mike Long (not from Bring the Fresh fame) created a product called Article Bully that went into great detail on how to use article marketing to create a business instead of merely using it to drive traffic.

He released this well over a year or more and if people were implementing what he showed in that product they would not even blink an eye at this Google change.

Respectfully,
Tim

Life and death is a cycle...

If EZA loses authority and dies off in popularity, they'll make some changes. Then only people with good content and little intention of marketing will start posting there. Then it will start gaining authority again.

Once it starts gaining authority again, Google will start ranking it high again. Then spammers will start spamming it again. Then Google will reduce it's authority and rank it low. Then EZA will make some changes to keep the spammers out.

Then it'll start getting its authority back again. Then Google will start ranking it high again. Then the spammers will come back again through the back door...

The same happened, and will continue to happen with Squidoo.

I'm tired of all the crap articles out there so if this results in poor content being eliminated I'm all for it!

The same article spun 100 times and submitted as if it's fresh doesn't add value to the internet at all.

I think people also forget how much of an asset sites like EZA are to Google as far as Adwords revenue. I truly don't see them going anywhere anytime soon.

Good riddance! Get rid of the article "spamming" going on..

Like anything else in life there are those who do things the right way and offer value and those who want to abuse and find shortcuts to get ahead. Nice to see someone is at least trying to police the system.

I can't count how many truly crappy articles are out there. Zero structure, poor grammar, poor punctuation, zero value.

I'm actually surprised how some of these articles directories "green light" the garbage articles that I come across.

I'm a 58 year-old IM newbie who used to write A quality term papers for people at about 20 minutes a page. Consequently, I hope content becomes "king" again, because it would give me an opportunity to make money by doing actual work and creating quality content.

I have been exploring niches and was looking at an Amazon product. I found an "article" on it on one of the biggies, maybe Ezine. It looked like it must have been a software creation, because the sentences didn't make sense; every sentence in the entire article contained at least one non sequitur. Of course, it was chock-full of quality keywords.

If this is the kind of "article" that google tells to take a flying "leap" through a rolling donut, I'm all for it. If people actually have to write quality articles with original content again, I may do my own and head over to Elance and one or two of the other sites I am hearing about.

If people can no longer take advantage of differences in currency by outsourcing things written in English by ESL students, this could be a nice way to carve out an honest living. What a concept.

There is a silver lining in this for those that are able to harness the opportunity that presents itself.

The standard procedure would be to make sure the content you create for your website is top notch and the content you submit to article directories and other sites such as Hubpages..etc is also high quality.

However, I think the real Willy Wonka Golden Ticket lies with the ability to secure guest blogging slots.

For this you will need to demonstrate that you can produce exceptionally good content and of course once given a guest blogging oppotunity you will need to blow the socks off them by providing out of this world content which will help brand you as a reliable source of content, create new opportunities for you, create backlinks for you and most importantly drive targeted traffic to yoru websites.

There will be a lot of bloggers that will need high quality content for their websites......fill that void and you create your own cash cow.

Respectfully,
Tim

only morons start these threads.

I been doing article marketing for 2 years. They singlehandedly, bring in the most money and are the best pre-sellers for me.

I find that more people who join my list from article marketing, the better chances I have of getting sales on the AR series.

Seriously, when I see a post like this, like OP I see a tired, moronic marketer who does not know what they are talking about. They are on the blame game wagon.

If you know how to use article marketing properly, you can make some serious money. Just go and have a look at other threads in here and successful newbies. There is so much you can do with article marketing. Seriously you will see another one of these idiotic threads pop up next week and the week after..... then the week after that.... pay no attention.

Nothing much to worry. We only need some even better article spinner software! LOL!

content was the king and it will stay the king
but yea, people will have to focus on quality
At most cases, 500 words article will do fine

If you are following the advice often given on the Warrior Forum and building your article content with quality, and then populating your own blogs or websites as the primary location of your articles, you avoid the "content farm" issue to start with.

Then if you are working on TimG's suggestion of guest blogging, and the method Bill Platt, Alexa Smith, John McCabe, and others commonly recommend of getting your content syndicated, you step out of the content farm issue again.

It is only when you are trusting a third party to consistently produce results for you when you are asking for trouble. EZA is valuable. Articlesbase is valuable. Squidooo, Wordpress.com, Blogger, etc..are all valuable. They are valuable additions to your your content funnel not as the home of your profits.

I believe it was John McCabe who recently mentioned he was working to have his own article syndication system and be self-supporting. There is a real gem of long-term wisdom to consider.

Will Article Marketing Die?

I doubt it. Yes,there are crappy content sites, but they won't die, and here's why:

1- The internet is based upon freedom - freedom to write garbage and freedom to read garbage. Yes, there are those who try to clean it up, but unless freedom of speech is banned (in the US, etc, where it is still free), then people will be able to write/read what they want

2- Yes, Google can adjust their algorithm to make spun content not rank, but they won't ban spun content/garbage

3- Google makes its money through Adsense. If they were to get rid of the content sites, they would lose millions of pages of content where they have their ads. I don't think Google wants to shoot its own golden goose.

Anyway, that's my two cents .

-Kaete

I have two things to offer here...

> The demise of Article Marketing depends quite a bit on your definition of the concept. I see it like a tree. There's a trunk with many branches, and when a branch becomes diseased and dies, it rots and falls off. But the tree itself lives on, and often thrives because the disease is gone.

> It might not mean anything, but I suspect the proposed changes are already taking place.

One of my sites is a collection of hand-picked articles plus my own contributions. Without much promotional effort, it reached a PR3.

I wanted to bulk up the site, so I installed one of those autoposter plugins, where a service supposedly delivered good content on a schedule. The first problem was that their definition of "good content" was very different from mine. Wanting to see what would happen, I loosened my standards a bit, taking some articles I normally wouldn't have as long as they fit the category.

My PR dropped to 0. The only articles that got any traffic at all were the ones that would have passed my selection standards in the first place.

So I cleaned out the crud.

In the most recent update, my PR is back up to a 2, and traffic is picking up a bit even though I've only added one article since the cleanout. And that article was one submitted by a guest writer after she approached me with the idea of putting up her article. It's about 1200 words of good, interesting information.

You can draw your own conclusions...

Personally, I've never been a fan of "XYZ marketing" where "XYZ" is a specific website. That's too narrow. Yeah, I know some people have made their whole fortune with just Adwords, or just eBay, or just Facebook. So I can't say they're "wrong" but I can say it's ill-advised. It's much safer to build your business on its own, and then use EVERYTHING you can to build inroads of traffic and outroads for content distro. Anything else is a gamble, and you're betting on something else you have no control over. This whole situation is no different. But if it comes to pass, it'll give the advantage back to content creators, which is fine, because I am one.

With Google, it's always been about serving up quality search results. I don't think they are intrinsically anti-internet marketer. They just want quality content in their search results. After all, that IS their main product. So they are just looking for better ways to separate the "wheat from the chaff."

So write, or have written, quality content. That's where the focus needs to be. The scrapped, worthless, auto-blog-type stuff is doomed to fail.

Google has declared war on spam. their failure in search recently has drawn a lot of attention and this is part of the reason their CEO was forced to step down (along with other failures recently) . There has been a lot of articles and complaints about spam coming up in most searches at the top and this pretty much means a huge change to their algo coming up .

Since a service such as UAW relies upon articles will its use still be justified after this change by Google?

Article marketing is not dying (nor is it dead) its just that article marketing "cheats" are in for a spanking. As (IMO) they should be.

If you are adding some quality to your content, sleep easy. You will have far less competition from cheap content and autoblogs in a few.
The joy!

Geez, I hope what you have written about is true. Somehow we will have to endure without content farms and poorly written, lousy articles. (just kidding, of course.) I guess we will have to wait and learn how this all "comes out in the wash." Hopefully, this will benefit those who are "white hat" marketers and article writers.

I don't think there is any way good article marketers will even notice. In the long run if any of the predictions come true it should help article marketing.

I think it is a misnomer to even call what Google may start a war with article marketing. You can call it backlink pimping, backling spamming, Google gaming or something else but it is not article marketing.

When it comes to the auto-blogging (Not the syndicated news sites etc. You know the ones I mean.) I think they will win that war (technically a battle). They won the keyword stuffing battle a long time ago. It should be relativley easy to win the "content stuffing" battle. Some very informative sites pull content from other sources but they have human editors that care. They also don't have a hundred unreadable spun articles on their sites.

Bring it on Google - the sooner the better! If you need some soldiers I will volunteer.

This has got to be a good thing as people will be forced to fill there sites with quality not quantity. I have had my concerns for sometime about the volume of meaningless junk that was being posted to gain backlinks. Too many poor quality articles were being far too much value.

No, the best way to summarize the title of this thread would be "The Death of Content" because let's face it, at the end of the day articles are just another form of online content no different to a blog post, press release, product review, whatever.

I take it that a lot of you guys seem to think that just because EZA or a third party site that took a hit, the content must have been junk.

Well, I had a hub on hubpages, that got around 500 hits a day. Now it's down to 196. This site held the top positions for a bunch of keywords in my niche.

It had over 200 comments. Real comments. From people that actually liked what I was sharing.

It only had about 50-70 backlinks. This was from other web 2.0 sites, high quality backlinks, and from people sharing it because of how great it was.

It held #1 for a couple of years for it's keyword. Now it's #4. The site that I own is now #1 for that particular keyword.

I'm not complaining at all because of this. A lot of my sites have moved up. But here's my takeaway.

All this, write quality content and it'll rank is nonsense. The bot or algo change can't tell what quality is.

However, unique content is key for sure. That along with backlinks from various sources will win.

And from what I've noticed, sites that have a ton of adsense on their page is taking a hit.

EZA shot themselves in the foot a while back. When they thought they were putting a stop to affiliate marketers for taking advantage of their traffic, they ended up hurting what they had by adding more blocks of adsense, along with a lot of other dumb BS.

How about that $300 article writer in India pumping out 750 word articles about
only topics he's the EXPERT at?

Nice analysis, Brian. The 'death of article writing' is a bit late coming, but
the final throes should be dramatic.

I wrote and shared "The Death of $5 Article Writing" nearly 2 years ago - coz
even then the trend was apparent. Quality content will never go 'out of
fashion'... but word-soup will!

All success
Dr.Mani

Strange things with this latest update, My thin sites with original but spammy keyword stuffed content are on the rise in the serps, while traffic from article directories with some of my better content is dropping off a cliff. The rise in serps makes up the difference.

This seems to be a article directory Slap ,much like the squidoo slap of a couple years back.

While everyone panics I think there will be a adjustment and then a rise back for some of the directories.
Perhaps some directories were targeted by google humans while the bots are still doing what bots do.

Here is the recent drop is serps...

ezinearticles.com lost an average of 34 positions
hubpages.com lost an average of 31 positions
squidoo.com lost an average of 15 positions
articlesbase.com lost an average of 29 positions
buzzle.com lost an average of 30 positions
associatedcontent.com lost an average of 22 positions
suite101.com lost an average of 33 positions

Not sure why Squidoo got a break.

I am seeing a ton more traffic on my auto blogs so I could care less, back up the brinks truck and lets have at it.Traffic to my Spammy thin content sites and autoblogs is through the roof right now.

Interesting statistics, what is the source that you get them from?

I don't rely on AM too much but I don't think that it will die because it is a main source of traffic for many.

Waah awesome!

Eh, my squidoo niche articles are doing fine.
Of course, I am sure everyone feels the same way. If spammy content farms get google slapped that's too bad for the content farms but good content is always welcome.

It would be like this. You should always have as many traffic sources and experiment with differerent ways to get traffic to your sites. So if one goes down, then there are others to fall back on.

Honestly this has not effected me in the slightest bit. If anything it has helped me in several different ways. For I am now getting more viewers to my articles thus in turn bringingmore visitors to my sites. Not to mention because of the google changes i have jumped several pages up in the serps for a few high powered keywords and in turn has practically doubled my traffic since the big google changes started taking place.

There for I believe if you are doing things properly by placing the article on your site first then placing on other sites after it gets indexed on your site. It can only help you in the long run. You should not be concerned with where your article is placed from a site like eza. Your only concern should be where your site gets ranked for that same article. Which since it will be the first it will gt bumped up in the serps.

The only thing you should be worried about as far as the the article sites go is syndication and getting more links back to your site from other site owners who liked your content. People are still going to scrap content no matter what changes with google.

However with the new changes no you do not have to worry about seeing your scrapped content on someone elses site with out your links for it does the site owner absolutely no good anymore to steel your hard work and paste it on their site that may have a better pr then you. In turn pushing you down the ranks and steeling your hard earned traffic.

Am I glad google is doing this hell yes. Like I said my sites have almost doubled in traffic since the big g changes started taking effect. My articles traffic and visitors has increased drastically. My visitors are more active on my sites sites thus making me more sales and revenue.

Hi,

I would like to say for all blogger who are saying it has death of Article marketing.all information is wrong.article marketing is a part of seo to promote website.so how can it possible .You know, there's been a lot of talk on various forums about some of the changes happening over at EzineArticles.com and how it will affect Article Marketers or Bum Marketers as they are also called.
While I for one think it's a good thing that Chris is increasing the quality standard of the articles, many think it's the "death of Bum Marketing" and EzineArticles.com as we know it.

Thanks

In some sense this could help smaller niche sites, Google seems to have found a problem with "large content farm sites" i.e about.com, eHow, Ezines, hubpages, ContentAuthority etc.

For example a small niche site about car mechanics should be fine. But a large site with is about car mechanics, acne, baking a cake, and a 100 other things may not. You can be an expert in car mechanics but how are you an expert in 100's of unrelated topics? Google will say that site must be built for targeting keywords only.

Smaller tightly targeted niches sites may benefit from this change as they may out rank the big content farms which have 1000's links to their domain more easily.

This is an interesting topic/debate...and explains a lot. Now that I'm reading this, I'm happy that I have been slowly adding video marketing to my marketing tactics.

Over the past few days, I've had more orders for longer articles than I did before. This may be the reason why..

I'll be keeping an eye on this thread. :-)

In one way or another I dont think Google can really be the God of everything. However it is actually a smart move from them if they have finally decided that the world wide web can be a better place when there is quality more than quantity in the search results. Yes I will still be writing for the sake of article marketing but i will be more careful now on from whom I will seek help/outsource my articles with.

Andrea

Carlsbadd,
I think you nailed it...and my stats are lining up quite well with yours.

I realize that this isn't the SEO section...but the issue here IMO doesn't have anything to do with "crap content" vs. "good content".

The issue is that Google just used a very broad brush and wiped many of the largest "content farms" (their term, not mine) off the map.

Looking over my stats, my best guess is that a couple of things happened:

1. Google manually devalued the Trust Rank being passed by many of the Web 2.0 sites and Article directories like EZA.

2. Google adjusted the weight of the internal linking of these sites drastically.

It's still too early to tell for sure, until the dust really settles...but I think it still comes back to backlinks at the end of this update.

For those who relied on using these authority sites as a way to simply post content and rank...for now, that is over.

However, if you were in the habit of getting backlinks to your articles, hubs, lens, etc...then it seems you may have escaped the algo wrath.

There was also a hint from a Wall Street Journal article that maybe Google is using their Adsense code to track the time on page...and when it is low, the page gets a low interaction score and drops in the SERPS.

Who knows what other things they are using to determine how people interact with the page to try and "weed out" what they see as poorly written content.

Best,
Jack Duncan

Terry,
Exactly right.

And this is clearly the case.

It looks like Hubpages, EZA got slammed with this update.

I've had solid content hubs in the top 10 for years now that are now sitting in pos. 40-50 and at least 100 rankings not in the top 100 anymore.

And it has nothing to do with the quality of the content.

Google has clearly devalued the weight of these big sites and they no longer have the authority they once had...good or bad content pages.

However, on my own domains and sites, I'm actually seeing an increase in rankings...and a big boost in traffic.

Best,
Jack Duncan

P.S. Here is that Wall Street Journal article I was referencing earlier...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...281747136.html

And here's a thread over at HubPages where people are chiming in about their traffic freefall:
http://hubpages.com/forum/topic/68565


.

I think every article marketer will up their game, articles is still a viable source for unique material, regardless of Google's penalisation, article marketing is still a great way to generate traffic

I wonder if google devalued their own blogger platform?

Great thread man. I'm totally with you. It's just another shift in the permaflux that makes people have to be more legit, God forbid.

I'm totally for it. It's kind of sickening watching people temporarily outrank me because they're using software to blast content out. Hasn't this always been ridiculous?

Well, to those of us with brains, yep.

Great thread.

The dogs bark but the caravan moves on....

Great news; thanks, Google gods. As a web consumer, I'm overjoyed that I may see less of this crap spun content and actually see usable information for a change.

As a writer, I see nothing but blue skies. I believe those of us who have always produced quality content will be in even greater demand.

Let the dance begin.

I see this as a positive thing for those who work hard to provide quality articles and then do some SEO. You mean I won't have to worry about some crappy autoblog with article excerpts outranking my EZA submission anymore? Not such a bad thing if you ask me.

In fact, many of my articles have already risen in rank and started getting more traffic. I've actually started to make more money since the algo change. Guess is you are some lazy ass with 100 autoblogs you'll lose money, but I could care less about that. Sorry, but some of us actually try to do the right thing.

This has been a fascinating thread to read because of so many experts providing factual data in terms of how the new algorithm's have positively or negatively hurt their websites.

Couple of things we should all keep in mind:

1 - The changes are relatively new so the real results will revealed once the dust has settled. There have been many instances where sites have dropped off the face of the search engine rankings only to reappear a few weeks later and in many cases ranking better then before. I plan to evaluate the changes in about 3-4 weeks from now.

2 - Target your efforts on what is currently working. If forum marketing is working for you then focus on it. If guest blogging is working for you then focus on it. If social marketing with Facebook is working for you then focus on it.

Bottom line is pay attention to what Google is doing but don't let it be your main focus or it will distract you from taking action and directing your efforts in the areas that are gaining in popularity.

3 - If you know what Google is devaluing then simply focus on what they do value. Also, take them out of the equation and focus on what other webmasters and web surfers want.

My take on this, is right now ORIGINAL high quality content is receiving a value increase from Google. With that in mind as long as you continue to create original content that offers value I believe you will be fine.

I'm talking about creating articles that provide enough value so that you have other webmasters craving your content and web sufers that actually want to read it.

Regarding sites like EZA and Hubpages....yes, many marketers are seeing big hits in the rankings of their content but keep in mind that those sites should be used to house your secondary content which feeds to your main sites which should hold your primary content.

You can actually follow EZA's traffic on this link - Traffic Stats for EzineArticles.com -- Building Massiv Traffic to Your Articles :-) and here Ezinearticles.com Site Info

It does show a slide but there have been traffic slides in the past and they have always recovered nicely.

Personally, I'd love to see them drop the amount of adsense ads they show and increase their quality content filters and I'm willing to bet they do just as well with Google as before.

Respectfully,
Tim

I think its great. People providing real value will benefit bigtime.

This happens in every business at some time and even multiple times through their lifetimes.

A good business person will react and step their game up in other methods.

So I guess u have something against Indian people huh?
And because of your status in this forum -
It gives you a right to talk rubbish against Indians?

What do you think of yourself dude???

Veena Furtado