The big news in the world of SEO (search engine optimization), of course, has been Google’s ranking algorithm change. According to Matt Cutts (head of Google’s anti-spam unit), Google makes over 500 changes to their ranking algorithm a year. They rarely make any announcements about specific changes, unless the change is significant- and it was.
The target du-jeur was the so-called “content farm”- sites with thousands or hundreds of thousands of low-quality articles (or shall we say “mixed” quality?). These sites earn revenues by getting clicks on their advertisement banners and links. Affiliate marketers, in turn (and don’t they always seem to get it in the shorts somehow?), depend on these sites ranking well to get clicks or “link juice” from links they place in their articles or biography boxes.
One of the hardest-hit sites was EzineArticles.com- which is ironic, because of all the article directories employed by article marketers, they have the most stringent submission requirements- so much so that article marketers need to have a completely different approach to using them to escape their 40% article rejection rate.
EzineArticles.com expects their traffic to drop by as much as 50%, from close to 60 million visitors a month to 30 million or less.
You can see a top-25 list of all the sites most severely penalized by Google’s ranking algorithm change here: http://www.sistrix.com/blog/985-google-farmer-update-quest-for-quality.html .
EzineArticles.com Responds
Chris Knight, the EzineArticles.com CEO, is doing his best to rectify the situation. You can read his open letter to EzineArticle.com authors here: http://blog.ezinearticles.com/2011/02/search-engine-algorithm-changes.html .
One of the ideas put forth by Chris to appease Google, was to remove any incentive affiliate marketers and SEO professionals might have for placing articles in their directory by making all links “nofollow”- essentially killing all link juice. The response to that idea was near unanimous- “don’t do it!” Chris quickly reversed his position as he must realize that the vast majority of content on his site comes from marketers.
Perhaps, one of the better suggestions was to increase the minimum word count for articles from 350 to over 500 or more. In most situations, Pareto’s 80/20 principle applies and chances are that the preponderance of “article vomit” fits the 350 word profile (I’ve seen some affiliate marketers successfully specialize in pumping out large quantities of article vomit).
The End For Content (Article) Marketers?
Hardly.
All it means is that the game continues to get tougher and more expensive (for the marketers and their clients). This may very well be a boon to native English-speaking writers who will now be in more demand for their higher-quality writing.
Does the user searching the web for information win? I think so. There’ll be less junk to sift through. However, what they do find may turn out to be just much better disguised junk (“lipstick on a pig”).
…so if not ezine articles? where?!
seriously…
i thought content was king….what’s wrong with article marketing all of a sudden?
cheers
David
Xnumerik, I don’t know if article marketing is really dead. It’s just a little less effective, especially if done with poor-quality articles.
There’s bound to be a lot of analysis over the next couple of months to measure the current effectiveness of article marketing. Once that’s published, you can bring it to your client’s attention- assuming the news is positive.
As for EzineArticles.com, who knows how long Google is going to penalize them. It may just be a temporary setback. In addition, other article sites, blogs, or forums may come in to ascendancy as good places for your content and backlinks.
Today, I had my first client request to remove the ezinearticle submission from my SEO proposal because to them, article marketing is dead!
SEO is an ever changing game!
Now all our linkbuilding schemes have to be rethought and things will become harder until someone finds the next great idea!