Earlier this year I started moving away from article marketing, both to promote my services and on behalf of clients, due to the Google Farmer and Panda updates. When the Farmer update was first implemented I wrote about it and pondered whether or not it had killed the benefits of article marketing. One of the big changes to their algorithms was how they treated sites that they deemed to be “content farms”. Unfortunately for the popular article directories that I regularly submitted to, they were considered a content farm Google and saw their traffic plummet by 30 to 40%. Additionally, the general consensus amongst the SEO community was the valued backlinks from the better directories would now have lesser weight then they once had.
In reviewing the whole concept of article marketing during a recent project, I have seen that there are still a large number of people using this online marketing tool. In fact I am starting to get a number of customer inquiries as to the service in addition to some newcomers who are asking me to write an ebook about it. So if others are still seeing value to this marketing tool, why not investigate to see if it’s worth pursuing again.
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As I start outlining my ebook, I have decided to try a little project starting in a few weeks. I am going to investigate some of the popular directories to see which ones are worth submitting to and then devising an article marketing strategy. My plan is to submit 10 articles per week to the various directories and then monitor a few things such as acceptance rate, incoming traffic from the articles as well as how many articles are getting republished by other sites. Finally, I want to see if I can determine the value of the backlinks and if I end up seeing any improvement in certain keyword terms that I am targeting.
Overall this effort is to assist me in the publication of my upcoming ebook but it will also determine if I should start offering this service to clients once again. Keep visiting the site and I’ll update you on the progress throughout. Also feel free to leave comments below on your experience with article marketing, whether its good, bad or indifferent.
Hey Chris,
I have been wondering about this too. It only makes sense that Google either has already or at some point will devalue the links from the places that got hit with the Panda update.
But, like most claims in this internet marketing field, nobody is proving anything. They are spouting their hypothesis without providing any proof.
I am actually conducting a case study on a new website to see if in fact the traditional method of posting articles to article directories still has the power required to get a website to rank well. I don’t want to drop the link to the article marketing case study here because I think it is kind of rude to drop links in comments.
If you are interested though, drop me an email or contact me via my contact form at my website and I’ll share the link so that you can watch the whole thing unfold. I’m only about a week into the test. So far things are working okay.
Hi Ted,
Thanks for the comment and my apologies in the delay in reading and approving the comment.
I will definitely contact you to get a link to the study and perhaps mention the site here in the blog as I think it is very relevant to my key interests. I agree that many people and article marketers are making claims that are more hypothesis then proof so I’m very interested in seeing how your case study is progressing.
All the best!
Chris
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