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Is article marketing still a good idea?

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What does Google Think of Article Marketing?

This lens will explore article marketing as a form of search engine optimization and internet marketing. We'll look at what it is, what it does, how to do it and whether or not it's still a viable solution for your online marketing campaign. We'll also see what Google thinks of it - an important thing to consider if you're using article marketing as a form of link building.

What is Article Marketing?

To know if you should use it, you must first know what it is

Article marketing was once a very popular way to accomplish link-building as party of an SEO strategy. People would use sites like E-zine, GoArticles and MyArticleNetwork to publish and distribute articles to many, many directories and other websites. In these articles, they would include keywords as anchor text, linked back to their own websites, thereby creating "link juice."

Unfortunately, these sites didn't always publish the content to high quality websites and the people publishing the content in the first place weren't always doing a good job.

What article marketing is *supposed* to do

  • 1Provide an opportunity for anyone with knowledge to become an "expert" and published author.
  • 2Be used as a platform for informative, relevant, factual and well-written content on many subjects.
  • 3Serve as a pool for blogs and other websites that were looking for content on a give subject. Other sites could then re-post the content and voila! they'be spreading the knowledge (in theory).

What article marketing *actually* does

The things that went wrong.

  • 1Became filled with poorly written, spammy content.
  • 2Distributed the same, low-quality content to hundreds and hundreds of websites that were also poorly developed, spammy sites.
  • 3Drowned good, accurate writers in a sea of non-native speakers' poorly-written garbage

So...

Google realized that this link-building opportunity was being abused, reduced value of this type of link and released the Panda Update.

A Video from Matt Cutts

Google's Search Expert weighs in

Google's Panda Update changed the way people used article marketing. Certain Google publications started providing information on duplicated content, keyword stuffing, etc. long before the update took place. Perhaps we should all take a hint and follow Matt Cutt's advice now.
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New Guestbook Comments

  • trinderfletcher Mar 25, 2012 @ 10:45 am | delete
    Article marketing used to be a good way of accomplishing link-building. However, it failed due to poorly written content, distribution of the same and drowning good writers among poor writers. Google therefore reduced value for this type of link and released the Panda Update.

    Trinder Fletcher
    Buy Original Articles for Website Content
  • Psykryph Sep 26, 2011 @ 10:56 am | delete
    Article marketing used to be one of my main forms of backlink building. I think there might be a little bit of a misconception about what the Panda updates did though. As far as I am aware, it only mattered for people who relied on DIRECT traffic or clicks from their articles. After Panda, their articles didn't rank high anymore.

    I do article marketing mainly for the link juice. As far as I know, Google did not reduce the value of those links, only their rankings. I could be wrong, but I still do article marketing today.
  • targetclickmarketing Sep 26, 2011 @ 1:59 pm | delete
    You make a good point, Psykryph. The Panda Update is chock full of misconceptions and it's difficult to pin down exactly which sites were affected for what reason. It's certainly a topic of debate ether Google reduced the value of article marketing links' juice, and some are saying that even if Google didn't devalue them with Panda, they had low value to begin with. Additionally, Google experts are making comments about how poor of and idea article marketing is.. just the way they've made comments in the past that ultimately lead to an algorithm change that affects many practices.

    We non-Google peons will really never know - it's just up to SEOs to do what's ethical for their clients and stay current on trends and best practices. Thanks for your input!
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