Patricia's Planet

Google have been kicking butt during the last week and a lot of the big content sites have lost large chunks of traffic due to the shake up. It wasn’t unexpected, in fact some of the more responsible article directory owners have been predicting Google’s wrath falling on shallow content farms for several years now.

Some of the sites suffering from this blow are Ezine Articles, Articles Base, Associated Content, Buzzle, Hubpages and even Bella Online. As Buzzle and Hubpages require unique to them content it’s hard to tell just what criteria Google are going by as yet. And although EZA have got tougher with authors during the last couple of years it seems that the raised standards just weren’t enough to keep them safe.

Whatever that is I don’t believe that it’s the death of article marketing, just a shakedown for all of those Internet marketers who have been trying to game the search engines to get top rankings with masses of crap content. Personally I don’t believe that most of the sites mentioned are the real culprits. I think that a lot of the directories are at fault yes, for accepting badly written or spun articles and there have been a growing number of blog chains built for the purpose of making money with adsense and whatever crap content they can find whether anybody can understand it or not.

Take for instance the following:

Now, computer inwards add-on to video games outdo near all early classify of diddle hand truck placed at fiddle retail merchant*. A allot by babies employ computer games and / or video games while because whenever you is not bumped inward colonnades and to boot net criminal record ecesises, therefore it is achievable that both at family and inward boosters’ domiciles. The factual computer gambling casino game manufacture constitutes immoderate a million clam community of interests. Inwards more halls, they are the cay clock time amidst deform.

That is the first paragraph of an article called ‘Interest Your Child In Educational Computer Games’ and the original is here. Or I think that is the original, it’s the only version that I could understand. Obviously some jerk has taken it and put it through either spinning software, or translated it into another language and back again, or perhaps both. Nobody will ever be able to understand it and to add insult to injury the crap copy has been quite widely syndicated on masses of blogs and those copies mostly rank higher than the original. As Google reckon to be placing the site where content was originally posted at the top hopefully that will change.

It’s disheartening to think that you have taken time and effort to write good articles and you are competing for a good placement in the search engines with rubbish that may even have been stolen from you and spun. That is what Google should be clamping down on, and the sites that accept content like that.

There is lots of doom and gloom on forums from those predicting the death of article marketing, but that mostly comes from those who have been pushing out quantity for backlinks instead of quality for syndication to authority sites. I’ve had some of my articles go viral and the effect of one really good article beats 10 mediocre articles hands down. I hope that we will see article marketing return to how it was intended and you can read more about how things changed in one of my favourite articles, Bill Platt’s ‘The Clash Of Titans: Article Directory Owners Vs. Automated Article Submission Services’

Am I worried about my article directories? Not yet, I’ve always been careful about quality and there is some unique content on those sites. Am I worried about my article marketing? No because I would much rather go back to low output and more syndication.

An upside is for niche site owners, expect lots of offers from guest bloggers who are feeling nervous about submitting to article directories right now, but do be careful what you accept. I’ve got 3 new guest bloggers just today offering unique content for some of my niche sites. I won’t say no to decent content that might help my sites in the search engines.

I’ve also been getting emails from a article directory software developer trying to sell licences for multiple domains for his software so that you can build directories and sell them. He reckons that niche directories are the answer to Google but I’m not too sure about that. It’s hard work building a directory and getting traffic to it, it’s even harder to make money with them so I really wouldn’t want to build and sell something that others may struggle with, it just wouldn’t be right.

This article is entirely my opinion and if you agree or disagree use the comment section.

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