A lot of things have been happening over the last few months with regards to article marketing and not too many of them have been good. The number of article directories has skyrocketed as more and more people think they can cash in with Adsense by publishing a ton of articles on all sorts of topics. So I want to take a look at what is going do wrong here.

The reality of course is that these idiots who are accepting articles from all and sundry are risking their Adsense accounts by serving ads on what amounts to either totally duplicate content, or badly re-written or spun PLR articles that are often less than 30% original and in most cases are barely readable or intelligible. In short, 90% of all the articles that are clogging up the SERPs are pure crap.

In a way, I’m not surprised that people are spamming the proliferation of article directories that are out there. I’d say 90% of them are doing it purely for the links to their sites in the mistaken belief that Google will rank them better if they have a guzillion links pointing to their site from as many places as possible.

Well, in theory, that is actually true, but what most of these idiot noobs don’t realize is that Google ignores links in duplicate content, so 99% of all the duplicated crap that gets mass splattered around the web is ignored. Very little of it ever makes it to the first few pages of Google’s index for most keywords, so we’re at least saved from the worst of it.

But even the 1% that does get through is still annoying in the least, so I can sympathize with anyone trying their hardest to seek out new, viable niches. All that regurgitated dross clogs up the SERPs and makes keyword research a lot harder than it ever was.

I know so, as I’m doing plenty of that research myself to build my own niche sites with.

There was a time when I could sell plenty of articles on Constant Content for around $25 per 500 word article (after they took their 35% commission) but not any more. Too many bulk article writing companies pay their writers peanuts to provide articles for less than $5 a pop, so people looking for content now go to the cheap alternatives. But the old saying holds, “you pay peanuts, you get monkeys!” and that’s what most of these articles look like they’ve been written by!

Its madness and there seems no end to it. But the vast majority of articles are written not to get people to their resource box, or even to funnel traffic to a site or sales page, but to get links. Pure and simple. That’s why there is so much of that dross out there in the first place.

Article marketing has taken a nightmare pill with marketers believing they have to get as many links as possible to rank their sites in the SERPs. The truth is that Google are changing their algorithm to favour authority sites and not thin MFA type sites with tons of backlinks propping them up. Sure, the links are still the major contributor, but Google are altering the way they count those links. If they come from duplicate articles, forget it - they are ignored. If they come from short, badly written articles on mass article directories, the majority are given such low value as to be almost worthless.

In one way, that’s good for people like me who are working hard on creating good, relevant and original articles for their own sites, whatever the niche. Better for those that use authority sites to get their links. I know Ezine Articles is getting snowed under, but at least they still human edit articles and don’t let through any crap. That means articles published there are given a lot of juice by Google, because its usually pretty good content and the site has a lot of authority because of it.

People who use article marketing the smart way are getting rewarded for their efforts (I’m seeing enormous gains in some niches by doing thing the right way). The clueless noobs that are doing no different from what spammers do are scrambling around like headless chickens getting nowhere fast.

Is there any end to this craziness? Of course there is, as soon as all the noobs realize they are, as usual, going about things in all the wrong ways. The problem is that as those noobs learn how to do thing the right way, more noobs come in to fill the vacuum left behind by the previous wave. And because there are still so many A-listers selling their snake oil to clueless noobs chasing the get rich quick dream, they are all learning how to spam the SERPs with more crap articles because the ebooks they are shelling out $97 a pop for are telling them to do that. Because it’ll make ‘em rich overnight, of course.

And as I look out the window, I see a herd of pigs flying over…

Terry Didcott
Blogging Web 2.0

Filed under: Writing