Matt Cutts on Article Marketing for SEO Advises No
Article Marketing as an SEO Strategy – Google Says Don’t
Article Marketing has been used as an SEO strategy for many years by successful internet marketers and in the past has proven effective for providing targeted traffic and a quality backlink. Matt Cutts describes how and why this is no longer a good idea as an SEO strategy.
Matt Cutts of the Google Webmaster Central Forum says that he is not personally a big fan of article marketing. Writing articles and having them published on article directories or article farms, as they are now called, has been abused by the bum marketers who blasted these article directories with poor quality articles for links. In the past this gave them a link back to their site at the end of the article, and in turn they would get the article published ( syndicated ) on many other article sites to receive yet more links back to their website.
The Panda/Farmer Algorithm Update
The end result of this is that the internet is filled with low quality duplicate content which is not desirable neither for user experience nor for the search engines. The Panda/Farmer update to Googles algorithm has addressed this problem so low quality duplicate content websites are being de-indexed.
Watch this video and see the point of view that is presented here by Matt about Article Marketing as an SEO Strategy.
Filed under: SEO Strategies
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Thanks for posting this! I guess I’m glad that I haven’t done a ton of article marketing to date. I wonder what they’ll come up with next to send us all scrambling!
However, what’s going to happen to the people who are buying article submitting software? I think that people tend to forget that although the backlinks might be few, there’s always the potential for traffic. If you sent you had hundreds of articles on hundreds of directories, then the law of averages will say that you will get additional clicks back to your site, and this doesn’t really require any additional effort on your part.
Googles algorithm is getting more and more sophisticated and they are stressing high quality content. Spun articles and automatic submissions may bring some traffic just please make sure it is not low quality duplicate content. My opinion is it can harm you in your ranking attempts.
Website back links are a great asset to improving your website’s page rank, but not all back links will help improve your website’s ranking. The number of back links is not limited to a certain amount, but with more hefty ranking sites that back link to your site, the better your page rank and better the traffic.