Article Marketing After The Penguin

If you are in the internet marketing business by now you have heard of “The Penguin” . Google’s recent algorithm changes have affected thousands of marketers and how we promote our sites. Gone are the days of simply building as many links as possible and article marketing may be one of the casualties.

The news of this change and how it has changed the landscape of internet marketing even appeared in The Wall Street Journal – As Google Tweaks Searches, Some get Lost In The Web

According to Matt Cutts “The Penguin algorithm update was designed to reduce Web spam, which is when websites try to get a higher search ranking than they deserve by deceiving or manipulating search engines,”

The question is exactly what and who decides what Web spam is? The who is obvious – Google the king of search engines. The what is somewhat cloudy.

While it is obvious that those affected will either need to make changes or get lost in the shuffle searching for answers on how to correct any issues finds many results that Google claims to be preventing. However, article marketing seems to be prone to many of the issues that have been flagged by Google as Spam.

Is Article Marketing Dead

That’s the question I’ve seen on several different forums and honestly nobody knows for sure. Most of the information I found when searching Google for answers all I come across is articles and blog post usually by Article Directories who have a vested interest in people continuing to post articles on their sites.

There is no question that if you were one of those who posted the same article on dozens of sites you will want to rethink this.

So Now What?

Article directories were first seen as a excellent source of information and the search engines loved them for their content but as with any great idea it gets exploited and before long thousands of sites began springing up and services offered to “Blast” your article to hundreds of sites.

Now Google has caught on and not surprisingly many marketers were caught off guard. Even though we had been told over and over that original content was king the lure of all those backlinks was more than many could resist.

Its time to get back to basics and use article marketing the way it was originally intended. Posting original content on only a few of the top sites and avoiding the temptation of dozens of backlinks and the promise of increased traffic and doing what really matters creating meaningful content.

Is There Life After The Penguin

That’s another question no one can answer with honesty. If your site was hit hard by the update then getting it back in the rankings may take more work then you are willing to do. Some will start new sites and others will just give up entirely.

What I find most interesting is that almost overnight Google created what they said they were preventing Web Spam. Now there are already people claiming to be able to help you get your site back in top of the search engines…For a price………….