Google Panda And The Death of Article Marketing

written by Michael Lautman on March 12, 2011 in SEO with 10 comments">10 comments

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You probably get the same emails that I do:

Dear sir/madam,

We are a Dehli-NCR based search engine optimization company…… blah blah blah…..article submission…. blah blah blah…

I always chuckle a bit before I mark these as spam, since I run a search engine optimization company. I mean, did you at least look at my website?

The truth is, article marketing has become a popular way for many people, especially small businesses to build links without too much effort. For those of you unfamiliar with the practice, article marketing involves writing articles, which you may or may not publish on your own website, and submitting them to a whole bunch of article directories. Once your article is published, the content becomes searchable, and usually includes a link to the writer’s website.

Many people who do small business SEO (and not just from overseas) have long suggested that this become a core part of a link building strategy. I was never a huge fan of this tactic because the article sites are usually the ones who benefit the most. After all, they get free content.

Some larger companies have jumped on this in recent years, creating sites loaded with their own content. Some of the better known ones are eHow, wikiHow and Suite101. The parent companies (AOL, Demand Media) either create the content themselves as cheaply as they can or they give writers the incentive of sharing a portion of the advertising revenue generated from their articles.

The ultimate result was a number of sites with load of very thin content that managed to achieve pretty good search rankings. Although sites like these were a great source of revenue for Google, they became a double-edged sword, since the content was usually very poor. Google shot to success after it’s launch in 1998 because it was able to quickly provide high quality, relevant search results to its users. It continued to improve over time becoming the the major player in search globally, while constantly updating its algorithms to fight spam. With the rise of article directories and so called “content farms” like eHow, Google found itself caught between its core value of providing great results and the revenue these sites generated.

One of the major factors that has forced Google to update its index (the “Panda” or “Farmer” update) was the small and amazing new search engine Blekko. Blekko allows users to limit their search results to certain types of results (say, universities or newspapers) and even create their own personal index of good sites that others can share.

Google updated its index at the end of February and has just recently made it possible for users to remove sites from their own search results.

The net result is that most article directories taken a major hit in their search results, and seen a corresponding decrease in traffic.

You can see that there is a massive decrease in the number of keywords that these (and other) article directories ranked for. The take home lesson here is that plain old article marketing is pretty much finished. Sure, these sites will still rank for some more obscure or niche search terms, but if you’re creating content for that niche, own the content. Publish it on your blog, then promote it on Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and other sites where people can find and share links to your site.

Interestingly, one of the biggest content farms, eHow, wasn’t seriously affected by the Panda update. eHow has a slick, modern look, with an advertising layout similar to many magazine sites, rather than the low-fi look of many article directories. This new breed of site might be a good way to distribute content but they’re unlikely to be a good source of link juice.

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Pmann

Thanks, Michael! Up until this evening, I was feeling somewaht proud of having an article “accepted” on ezines.

Now, I will have to deny being the author if anyone ever comes up to me on the street, to ask me about this.
- michael
  
  I’ve posted some articles to directories too! In some niches they still rank reasonably well, but if that’s the case for your articles you should be able get good results by posting good content on your own blog and doing some SEO.
Cgm

Nice article Michael! You aren’t “article marketing” using LinkedIn are you? Laughs aside, article marketing in the form you mention is very well dead and buried but there is still great value in writing quality articles and publishing them on your sites, or as a guest poster on related blogs. I think google is, and will always, favor this type of content creation, after all, it’s the base of their business.

The mass dissemination of low quality content is what Panda killed, and rightly so. Now hopefully this will kill all those MFA sites that serve no purpose whatsoever. If only Google would recognized “spun” content …

Cheers,
cgm
- http://contextaseo.com/ Michael Lautman
  
  Thanks for the comment CGM. I appreciate the feedback. I know that you know there is an important difference between using the same content over and over versus promoting that content across the web using LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Social bookmarking site like Delicious and StumbleUpon… nobody wants to publish into a void!
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Cybergrl1

I like the article and I agree with you, the problem is that the quality of the content being contributed on these revenue sharing sites was poor and Google wants writers to give the reader more in dept information and as you mentioned own the content on their own blogs to give a better user experience.

My opinion is that the use of social media along with chat rooms, message boards, forums and places where people gather on a regular basis on the web. Other places like you mentioned such as bookmarking sites and video sharing sites, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter is where webmasters and bloggers will have to go to get traffic to their websites, because just relying on search engines to send traffic for free is over.

Social media marketing requires more work and it something you can not just set and forget, it requires attention and care.

Those who are in business to try and game the system with SEO are just wasting time, instead they should be trying to produce the best content they can and then become involved with other bloggers in their niche. I think that is why there is so much emphasis on “Branding”.

Its sad that spammers have ruined it for legitimate article writers, now because of the people who wanted to earn google adsense on a free ride, those who really have something important to say have to work harder to prove themselves worthy of any organic traffic they receive.
- michael
  
  Thanks for your comment. I think that your response touches on a lot of common misconceptions about SEO. The truth is that content marketing should be at the heart of any good online marketing strategy. However, content marketing loses most of it’s potential if the content you create is not accessible to search engines. Good SEO just ensures that you are making it as easy as possible for the Googlebot to understand you content.
http://www.michaelmyhero.com Linsm2010

Funny. I have read Ehow articles. My email box gets several a day. I don’t bother to read them. I delete them without opening them up anymore. Most of the Ehows are worthless.
- Anonymous
  
  Thanks for the comment, and sorry for the delay in responding. Ehow is a great example of a site with poor content that still manages to rank well. In my opinion, the biggest reason is that the site is very slick and professional, and that the advertising isn’t too obtrusive. I would unsubscribe from the newsletters though.
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