A lot of people are wondering if article marketing still works after the recent Google Panda update. For those of you who aren’t aware of what the Panda update is, you need to start paying more attention what’s going on in the Internet Marketing/Search Engine world. Those who knew it was coming were prepped and ready to watch for any impact, and make necessary changes to maintain their traffic flow. If you still don’t know what the Panda update is, just do a Google search for it and you’ll find tons of information about it.

This post isn’t about Google or its algorithms, but what we need to realize is that Google, via a recent Matt Cutts video, has told us that they have, for the most part, devalued the links coming from article directories and content farms down to a level that makes article marketing for SEO purposes nothing short of a huge waste of time.

A Little History

But here’s the thing – and the central idea of this entire blog post. Writing and submitting articles for the sole purpose of getting backlinks to your website is NOT article marketing. For many years now – as both an article directory owner at http://www.website-articles.net and an article marketer – I’ve been teaching webmasters and Internet business owners that article marketing is a marketing technique, not an SEO technique. There is a HUGE difference here, folks. In the past, any backlink “juice” that was received from the search engines should have merely been considered a pleasant by-product of a successful article marketing campaign.

Unfortunately, Google started all of this several years ago by admitting that their algorithms would rank any website higher (or at least give them a much higher chance) if they had more backlinks than any other website. And so began the age of S.A.D. marketing. Anyone submitting articles by the dozens, hundreds or even thousands, to get backlinks to their website (for SEO purposes) have been doing what I call S.A.D. marketing – Spamming Article Directories.

Whether this was your intention or not, by jumping on the article backlink bandwagon, that is exactly what you were doing. Does that mean that you were doing a bad thing? Absolutely not – heck, I was doing it too. Suddenly, it was an established Internet marketing technique to write and submit articles to article directories. The more the better. This was accepted by webmasters and marketers, but it was a nightmare for respectable article directory owners. Keeping the spam out was a major concern for the directory admins, and became a tormenting, yet necessary full time job.

As this technique became more popular, some serious, negative issues began to appear. The worst of these issues was greedy and/or blackhat marketers writing, spinning and submitting thousands and thousands of crappy articles to as many article directories as they could find. Eventually, computer software programs were written to make it even easier and more accessible. This has flooded the Internet with shallow, sometimes even incomprehensible articles that give a reader absolutely no value.

Many article directories had no choice but to shut their doors, while those who remained open had submission queues thousands of articles long. This is why it took so long to get your article reviewed at most of the larger article directories. I remember for a time that some of the big ones had 4-6 month review times! Now you know why.

Long story short – after years of this, Google finally did something about it by initiating the Panda update. By devaluing the link value of article directory sites, they are hoping to hit the content spammers head on.

And it’s about damn time!

In fact, as the owner of several article directories, I have already noticed a difference in the amount and quality of articles being submitted. They’re coming in at a slower rate while at the same time, the quality (compelling content, grammar, spelling, word count, etc…) is quickly increasing.

So, Is Article Marketing Dead?

Well, yes and no. The answer lies in whether or not you have been utilizing your articles for SEO (backlinks), or for true marketing purposes. If you are one of those people who would write up a ton of crappy articles and submit them all over the Internet for backlinks, then yes, article marketing is dead – spoiled – rotting.

But if you have actually been using your content to tactfully market yourself or your product or service, then by no means is article marketing dead. In fact, if you are actually utilizing your content to truly market your stuff, then this Google algorithm update is, in my opinion, a blessing in disguise.

As more and more SEO-oriented content submitters come to the realization that directory backlinks aren’t going to help their SEO efforts, they will stop spamming article directories with their hastily written, usually sub-average content. This will lessen the saturation of your niches within the article directories and it will allow your article to remain on “most recent” and “category” pages for a longer amount of time. Over time, it will help re-establish article directories as respectable and informative content repositories.

Times change and rules change, everybody. Today it’s all about getting those who read your articles to click on your link and get to your website. No longer is it about getting backlinks for SEO purposes…and this changes the game. It levels the paying field and will allow the cream to finally rise to the top again.

In later blog posts, we’ll discuss what the “cream” actually is. While spamming article directories is becoming a thing of the past, you still cannot simply submit articles to directories and expect the traffic to come. You have got to do it the right way – and I’ll tell you how to do it with solid data on what is working today.

It’s still too early to tell how everything is going to pan out. All we know now is that Google has taken away rankings from certain directories and they have devalued the links from most, if not all of them. A word of caution: Be careful who you listen to during these next few weeks. There are only a handful of folks on this planet who have enough information right now to give any solid advice. Any advice you hear will only be speculation at this point, and will probably go right along with whatever that person is selling!

I am watching tens of thousands of articles every day – as I have been for the last six years. When it comes to identifying search engine trends when it comes to articles, I don’t know of anyone who is more experienced. In light of the Panda update, I am spending extra time, taking notes and really putting my head around all of the statistics that are coming in. And trust me, it’s not as easy as you might think!

In the coming weeks, I’ll be discussing the best ways to market your content now that Google has devalued article directory links and true marketers will be given back their article directories! And as I research, identify and test what I am seeing from our article statistics, I will be sharing them with you all right here on David’s blog.

Make sure to bookmark this page or subscribe to the feed so you don’t miss this valuable information.

Good luck and KEEP WRITING!
Allen Graves