What is happening with article marketing? I believe it is just as powerful as it used to be, but it is now a part of a much bigger dynamic we call content marketing. You see, when I got started with article marketing, you could completely dominate Google just by doing it. It would provide the content Google wanted, it provided the links they wanted, and you could do just about anything you wanted with pagerank and rankings on search pages just with volume.
Now, Google has done what I predicted years ago – filtered against the spinning, spamming, and duplicate content that became so popular because of the ease of using am to dominate Google. So when I did article writing, I built it to survive the final Google cut on the old style of article marketing.
And now that they have finally filtered the bad results out of articles-based search results (what some call the Panda update, although there are likely many more algorithmic changes that impact gross manipulation of search rankings with spammish and ant-Google policy article writing), article marketing can ONLY be done the way I taught – which is solid content, original content, don’t submit the same content to multiple directories except in one specific case scenario.
What Google is looking for now is content. Original content. And I believe now that content marketing is 10 times more important than it was when I started for getting Google rankings. I was one of the first to push for content as a way to get traffic consistently from Google, and I predicted that Google would filter the spam over time – and that’s one of the reason I built my business that way. Now – it is critical for everyone who wants Google traffic. So I believe it is 10 times more important, and I believe demand will be 10 times higher now than it was when I cut my teeth teaching article marketing.
Whereas before, articles could be used to control search rankings, now things are a bit more complicated. The principles are the same, but the focus is more along the lines of what most people call content marketing. I believe it will become the backbone of SEO, just like for years, article marketing was such a critical piece of SEO (although, technically, it was the link building that was the backbone of manipulating search rankings).
