The Google Panda update caused quite a bit of panic in the internet marketing community, and many people have since abandoned article marketing as a form of link building. We’ve received calls and emails from clients wondering how the update might affect them, and we’ve had colleagues wonder if they should abandon all forms of article marketing.
Our answer? Don’t jump ship just yet. The heart of the updates was the quality of content. There are still plenty of article directories that rank very well for certain keywords, and those rankings are based on quality factors.
Quality is Key
Much of what shows up on syndicated sites is worthless. Content that has no substance isn’t worth anything to anyone, and Google took the appropriate action. Ezine articles lost a lot of rankings post-Panda. But some of their pages held fast. The pages that made it? Those that were written by actual expert authors and had real substance. Word counts of 300 or less? Probably worthless. Word counts of 500 plus – there is probably substance in there. They looked at the structure of the articles, as well. Content that was created just to boost keywords was probably affected. But content that sought to educate and inform made the grade.
We recommend, as always, a varied link building strategy. Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Article marketing can still work as part of a well-planned strategy. The more information you are putting out on the web that is valuable to readers, the better off you’ll be.
Article Directories Lost Their Original Purpose
Article directories were not designed to be the spam havens they are today. They were set up so that people could share information in easy to use and easy to find platforms. Over the years they became overrun and diluted with worthless articles whose sole purpose was to generate backlinks. People began using software to literally spin articles to make someone else’s work appear “unique.” All Google really did was try to bring some integrity back to the platform.
So if you are taking the time to create good, solid content, you can be confided that your articles will make the grade. But you should mix it up a bit and try to stay up to date with all best practices for quality link building. Consider doing guest blogging in your niche. Get active on social media platforms. Submit articles to nontraditional outlets and add a little spice to your article campaign.
At the end of the day, as long as you work with users in mind, you shouldn’t have to worry about Google algorithm updates. If you engaged in internet marketing techniques that all along seemed a bit too easy to be effective, you were probably right.