Article Marketing Still Work After Panda
The Precursors To Panda
For years people were getting away with producing exceptionally low value content and managing to somehow sneak it by quality control inspectors so that it ended up getting published at the more popular article websites. This wasn’t happening at just one or two websites that accepted amateur authors’ articles. It was happening to the vast majority of them.
On top of the low quality articles, most of those popular article directory style websites were putting so much advertising on their pages that it was turning off visitors. It was tarnishing people’s opinions of the material that is published on those sites. On top of that, many of these article directories were publishing content that was considered duplicate content because it had already been published elsewhere or was going to be published elsewhere in great numbers.
Users started complaining to people at Google about how they felt that articles on websites of this style did not deserve the excellent ranking that they were getting. Google started to listen. So Google came up with a series of questions to ask about a website or web page to get a better sense of people’s true opinion about those sites and pages. Based on this information they were able to create an algorithm that helps identify and filter this kind of low quality content from the search results.
How This Changed Article Marketing
Now that we know that Google does have ways of identifying low value content, it is safe to assume a few basic things. First, it is safe to assume that low value content is going to be much harder to get ranked in the search results. That means that it is less likely to get as much traffic as it used to. In fact, the traffic levels for that content are likely to be so bad that you will get hardly any readers at all.
Another thing we can assume is that now that Google can identify that low value content, they are likely to devalue the links that come from those sources. We don’t know for sure if they have done that yet, but it is safe to assume that they will at some point. It would be an easy way to nullify a lot of the links that were generated solely for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings.
Testing whether or not articles in general still have any ranking juice to pass on to other websites is part of the test that is being conducted at Article Marketing Case Study. So stay tuned to see what the final results show.
What Is An Article Marketer Supposed To Do
The common sense thing to do is to put more effort into your articles. If you are writing them yourself make sure you are being thorough. Maybe you should proofread them a second or third time and edit where necessary. If you are outsourcing your articles then maybe you should make sure the quality level of your outsourcer is up to snuff. Do people really like what they are reading?
Make sure that you are publishing on websites where there is still going to be some benefit to doing so. That means that you should welcome a website that has strict quality guidelines so long as they aren’t being unreasonable. The quality of the domain that is hosting your article is going to be a much bigger deal than ever before.
Promote your articles with social media if you aren’t already doing so. This is important because it let’s Google know that someone actually cares about that article. Don’t try to fake it either by using fake social media accounts. The search engines have said that it is far easier to spot manipulation and fraud in social media profiles than it is to spot it in web page content. So I wouldn’t be wasting time spamming social media accounts. One or two legit votes from real human accounts will count more than a hundred bogus ones.
Panda Did Not Kill Article Marketing
Thankfully, the Panda update did not kill article marketing. Here is proof. Instead, it made it better for people who focus on trying to produce individually written, unique and useful content intended to provide benefits to someone other than the publisher. If you focus on doing that and publish on sites that insist you do that, then you will still see results.