Article Marketing: Effective Strategy or Thing of the Past?
For years now, the secret weapon of choice for many SEO experts has been to use article marketing to consistently outrank the competition. The reason was clear. It worked.
But does article marketing still have the punch that it has had in years gone by? Not according to Google. In a recent Q&A chat, Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye from Google answered some hardball questions from webmasters, which was then summarized by WebProNews:
“Question: Until recentley (the last six months or so) a high ranking was achievable by submitting articles to article directories (providing they were 40%-60% unique), it no longer seems to be the case. Have links from article sites been de-valued at all?
Google’s Answer: In my experience, not every article directory site is high-quality. Sometimes you see a ton of articles copied all over the place, and it’s hard to even find original content on the site. The user experience for a lot of those article directory sites can be pretty bad too. So you’d see users landing on those sorts of pages have a bad experience. If you’re thinking of boosting your reputation and getting to be well-known, I might not start as the very first thing with an article directory. Sometimes it’s nice to get to be known a little better before jumping in and submitting a ton of articles as the first thing.
Translation: Yes. “
Though WebProNews said that this translated to a solid yes, I’m not so sure that’s exactly what the Google guys said. But then again, rarely are these guys crystal clear when discussing direct factors of the algorithms themselves. What they did say makes me wonder if article marketing might be changing a bit. That the strategies for successful article marketing might need to seriously be adjusted to be effective at all.
Because in my opinion, the Google guys did say that there are article directories that do have authority. So my take on it is that you can still make articles work for you, you just need to rethink your article submission plans. It might be a good idea to stop blasting them via autosubmitters or submission services and start hand submitting them to a few elite directories. Authoritative article sites. Not just any directory with a submission page.
But even this may be ending soon. Because once the Google Gods start turning on something, it is often the end of that particular medium. Which brings me to the purpose of this post.
The end of article marketing doesn’t mean the end of content and it’s weight overall. It only means that valuable content within your website is going to have even more weight with the search engines. Which means that blogs and blogging might just become even more powerful in the future.
If you don’t have a business blog, you might want to consider getting one. Give us a call, let us show you how blogging can take your company to the top of the search results.
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I look forward to hearing from you soon!
November 14th, 2008 at 2:14 am
It agree 100 %. I from Russia and for me a theme of advancement the Internet of projects am actual, including for their advancement in Google. Advancement by articles can remain on former effective, but demands “jeweller” work.