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Article Marketing In Crisis?

By Vickie J. Scanlon





Is Article Marketing in crisis? The one time marketing tool, article marketing, gave many a reliable way to build quality links and drive traffic to their website(s). But is it still the case?

With the Farmer/Panda update, Google (though they claimed the update was to find more high quality sites in search) it did take aim at the article directories, many low quality content farms and other sites.

Does this change the landscape for article marketing? If you relied only on spinning and mass submission of articles to the many article directories out on the Internet, the answer is yes. And, do not be surprised to find that in the short term, you'll find the article directories links to be devalued. As to long-term effects, we will have to see the full impact.

According to "The Panda Reaps-Is Article Marketing Still Viable?"  By Dan DeRoeck, article marketing is still viable, however, if you relied solely on article campaigns to get your traffic, you will have to develop a different strategy. Here are a few things he touched on:

1. Deliver high quality content
2. Publish content on your site (Worked for some, but some got hit indirectly by the update)
3. Choose the top article directories and use them sparingly.
4. Diversity, diversify, diversity

Let's look at one important piece of the changed article marketing crisis-quality content. There are some ways in which you can improve the quality of your content, some suggestions may be easy to swallow, while others may be like a personal attack on your workmanship. But needless to say, if you want your business to strive, you have to move with the times.


How to Improve the Quality of Your Content

As you may expect, and are seeing quality content will be at the forefront. If you have diligently worked on your website to deliver quality content, you should see your web pages beginning to rank well. If your pages are of low standard, it's time to do one of two things, improve the quality of the pages or remove the pages altogether.

According to Google's Maile Ohye, if you have a page that is only a listing, with no quality content, then you might want to put a <meta name=robots content=noindex> on those pages until they have unique and high quality content on them. Why do it in the head of your web page instead of in your robots.txt file? It will let the search engines know that the pages exist and they can start building history for them. Once the pages are no longer blocked, they can more quickly be ranked appropriately.

Also, the ratio of content to ads should be appropriate. If you have ads above the fold with no content, or content with so many ads that it's difficult to know the difference between the ads and the copy, in the eyes of Google it can affect your ranking because they will label it not useful. 

It will take time to see an improvement, if you are making quality changes to your website. Be aware, if in the past Google deemed your site "not useful", the Google crawler may not have frequented your site no more than once a month. So be patient.

To conclude, article marketing can offer you a way to get traffic to your site, but it should not be the only method used. You must diversify.