Google SEO Tip #120 – Do You Recommend Article Marketing As An SEO Strategy?
Matt Cutts: Honestly I’m not a huge fan of article marketing. I mean if you think about it you’re writing an article and you try to include a link at the bottom and you’re hoping a bunch of other people put up copies or mirrors or duplicates of that article and that those links might flow through.
Typically the sorts of sites that just republish these articles are not the highest quality sites. A lot of times the articles themselves are not the highest quality where someone will say you have to write x number of words and someone will write exactly x number of words.
You end up with a lot of duplicate content across the web, sometimes duplicate anchor text. So if I had to foresee what does the trend hold, these are not really editorial links where somebody is really making the choice that this is a great site as a lot of other links on the web.
So, should you pursue article marketing? I would probably lean away from that and lean more towards great content that naturally has links, some good social media marketing so that people are linking to it organically for reasons that they really love it rather than someone needs five articles to put up on their website and they just go to this article bank somewhere, grab five articles and then slap it up on their website.
That tends to be not as high quality in terms of links as you know regular links that people are actually deliberately making across the web.
So if I had to make a prophecy or forecast about how Google feels or how search engines feel about them in general, the trend that I am hearing and the sort of complaints that I am hearing are that people are not huge fans of article marketing and don’t view it as an incredible value add in terms of the content that gets added to the web.
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I don’t really agree with entire article. I still get lots of traffic from article directory sites and bulks of my affiliate earning are from article marketing traffic.
Google recent algorithm is making most of us feel that ‘Bum marketing’ is dead’ But according to me more internet marketer quit article marketing more benefiting is for those who don’t quit since they have less competition which means more profit.
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Hi John, I believe when Matt says “So if I had to make a prophecy or forecast about how Google feels or how search engines feel about them in general, the trend that I am hearing and the sort of complaints that I am hearing are that people are not huge fans of article marketing and don’t view it as an incredible value add in terms of the content that gets added to the web.” …he’s giving us a little heads up on where the article marketing strategy is going.
The other thing about the term “article marketing” is that it means different things to different people.
When I refer to article marketing
- low quality article
- typically around 400 words in length
- blasted out to 200+ article directories
The reason I stay away from the style of article marketing I mentioned above is it doesn’t have a future.
James
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I think writing a 100% original article ONCE and having published on another domain other than yours is always valid, but I find I can do more powerful things with my time, such as;
Write a 1500 word HIGH quality post with details, tables, math, pictures, etc., on your blog and link to your other blog posts from it. Then you get the beautiful content on YOUR domain exclusively, AND those links are high-quality links in Google’s eyes.
So you get a juicy piece of content updating your domain, and then around 10-15 high quality links to your own pages and posts.
I tested this in late 2008 by starting a blog with just high quality content as described above. I have NEVER done article marketing on it – NEVER used the PAD technique – NEVER swapped links, and NEVER did quest blogging. Absolutely no linking.
It gets more traffic than ANY of our other domains, and it’s the highest earner.
This one blog makes between $1700-$2200 a month in Adsense, and growing. Because it has never been link optimized it has PR of only 1 – PR means almost nothing when it comes to earnings.
Brent Truitt recently posted..Secret to Getting High Quality Inbound Links
Hi Brent,
Great points, and thanks for sharing you tips and advice. Much appreciated.
Another great case in point is the “Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors” just released by Danny Sullivan over at SearchEngineLand.com.
I would imagine the links he’ll receive for creating that quality piece will be huge. Link bait as it’s called by some. Great high quality content as it’s called by others.
Check it out:
http://searchengineland.com/seotable/download-periodic-table-of-seo
Thanks for stopping by.
James
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I agree with John. Article marketing still works. They may not be as high quality of backlinks as PAD but they do count as a backlink. I start off all my new sites backlinking with article marketing and social bookmarking and start seeing results over time.
When you compare the quality of an article marketing backlink vs a PAD backlink or natural backlink, these 2 win all the way and are worth more in juice.
Article marketing definitely still works. But this doesn’t mean that without article marketing you can’t succeed with a website SEO strategy. Actually I think that there are not musts on a SEO strategy, there are too many factors that affect your rankings in SERPs and depends on you how you prefer to work.
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Article marketing can work if you find a golden nugget keyword that you can rank for. As for mass submission, I tried a few submission software and didn’t get good results.
Hi Rick, thanks for sharing your experience on mass submission. More people need to hear and take to heart that it doesn’t yield good results.
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