All Entries Tagged With: "google"

Is Google Penalizing Article Marketers?

Every now and then I get a question about Google’s policy of discounting links from article directories. Is Google penalizing article marketers?

The question stems from a fundamental misunderstanding about article marketing. Article marketing is not about getting links from search engines article directories. It never has been about that. Rather, article marketing is about building links from other websites, building your authority and credibility as an expert in your niche, and driving traffic to your website. If you do it correctly, that’s what will happen. You don’t really need that link from the article directory.

What you want to happen is for your articles in the article directories to get picked up by publishers in your niche. If you write good articles that deserve to be published, those articles will be published by other bloggers and webmasters. When publishers use your articles, you’ll get your coveted links from that, but you’ll also get the traffic from those publishers’ websites. In addition to those search marketing benefits, you’ll be building your reputation as an authoritative source within your niche. That’s what article marketing is about. Don’t get shortsighted about links from article directories.

Article Directories: What Makes A Good One?

How do you know which article directories to submit your website to? Believe me, it’s not easy. I’d be real careful about submitting to every directory out there. Some are better than others. But there is one criteria that is often cited about article directories that I would caution you against in using as a selection criteria. That criteria is PageRank. Don’t use it.

PageRank can be deceiving. Just because a web domain has a high PageRank doesn’t mean it’s a good article directory. Maybe it has a high PageRank because it was another type of website for 10 years and just recently converted into an article directory. If that’s the case then it needs to prove itself as an article directory.

A better thing to look at is traffic. How much traffic does that article directory get? You can find out by going to Alexa.com and checking the traffic stats. This isn’t a perfect tool, but Alexa can give you an idea about traffic. Look at the upward and downward trend over the last 3 months. Then look at the raw traffic numbers. If the traffic is low and the downward trend is going down then it’s not a good site. If the traffic number is high and the trend is upward then that’s a good sign.

Another thing you can do is go to Google and type in site:http://www.nameofarticledirectory.com. Google will tell you how many pages of that article directory have been indexed. If the number is low then the directory probably has website crawl issues. If the number is high then it’s a good directory.

Also take a look at the cache option in your Google toolbar (you do have the Google toolbar, don’t you?). How long ago was the site cached? If it’s been too long then it isn’t getting updated very often.

Keep in mind that Google no longer passes link juice from article directories. That’s not to say that it couldn’t. Google often overlooks its own policies. But don’t count on links from article directories. You are submitting articles for traffic. It’s nice if that traffic comes from the article directory, but it doesn’t to. You want other publishers to use your articles. The traffic and links from those publisher websites are what you really want the article directory to do for you. If you find your articles getting published then you’ve found a good article directory.

Google Hates Cookie Cutter Systems

As a professional article marketer and someone very interested in winning the Google ranking game, i pay real close attention to what Google likes and dislikes. I pay attention to their mouthpiece Google Guy, Matt Cutts says; I read Google’s blogs; and I read blog posts and news stories posted about Google.

As with any industry, it is important to be well read and open to all viewpoints relative to the work you are doing. When one is interested in getting good google rankings, it is generally very wise to absorb everything that can be learned about the inner-workings of Google. In gaining knowledge about your industry and your adversaries, you are better prepared to meet the challenges you will face.

Article marketing is a promotional method that when used well, is a very powerful tool in the search engine ranking challenge. There are of course right ways and wrong ways to use article marketing to build traffic to your website and to improve your website’s ranking in Google‘s search results pages (SERPs).

But, when one takes the time to work article marketing in the way that is was first developed, then the sky is the limit. The way article marketing was designed was to create content that people would want to publish, and then to give people the right to publish it for free, provided a bio and link is given back to the author of the article.

From the inception of Google (the college thesis that explained how Google would produce better search results), the focus has always been on organic inbound links to a website. From the beginning, the founders of Google knew that a website should be ranked according to how many people create links to it, and the ranking should take into account the quality of the page presenting the links.

When done correctly, article marketing can generate links from websites of all sizes, from around the world. When your work impresses its readers, you can find your articles translated to Italian, Russian, German, and many other languages. How much did it cost me to get my articles translated into these other languages? Not a dime. The people who did the translation liked the content so much, that they did the translation for me for free, just so that they could share my message with their readers!

Your articles will end up on domains from around the world and .ORG, .NET, .EDU, all from websites of various topics and sizes, and from webistes in dozens of different countries including the UK and the Philippines. Some sites that will print your articles have hundreds of thousands of articles on every topic, while others have two dozen pages on just a few specific topics. You may even find your articles on College Websites that have dot com domain names.

When you write great articles, people of every class, race, location, business model, and domain type and location will publish your articles, as demonstrated by the links in the above paragraphs.

I truly believe that this is what Google wants to see, when they see us using article marketing as a link building procedure. They want to see your articles published a little bit of everywhere. When they see that, then they know that what you write has value in the eyes of many, so therefore, the links from your articles deserve to be given real merit. I wrote another article that described this in much greater detail, as seen here and on dozens of other websites.

Some people are willing to argue that article marketing is a promotional method looked down upon by Google, as described here. But frequently the people making this argument are the ones who make a half-assed attempt at article marketing, and when they have done their article marketing badly or in a lazy way, they prefer to blame the technique, rather than to look in the mirror for blame.

The people who have “bad luck” with article marketing are frequently those who either write really bad articles, with poor grammar or no real value for the reader, they use some cookie-cutter system to distribute their articles, or a combination of both.

Cookie-cutter article distribution systems are those that send all of the articles they distribution to exactly the same websites, every time they process an article. When the article is cookie-cutter distributed and the article has no real value to its readers, then every article by that author will have the exact same footprint in the linking portfolio as the next article. Google has always complained about and tried to wipe out the value of any cookie-cutter linking system.

Over the years Google has been successful at wiping out many cookie-cutter link building systems. Do you remember the FFA craze (Free-For-All pages)? It doesn’t work anymore. Do you remember those “paid link” services? Most of those offer no search ranking value anymore. Do you remember those paid blog post services? Yep. We have been advised against those too.

I believe that cookie-cutter article distribution services are coming to the same end, if they have not already lost their value in the algorithms of Google.

Does that mean that since I own an article distribution service that I am quaking in my shoes? No – I am not worried. Why? Because my article distribution service has NEVER been a cookie-cutter service. By design, we do not force feed articles to article directories. (If you want your articles placed in article directories, then we suggest you also use Isnare.com in addition to our service.)

Our article distribution processes rely entirely upon the publishers’ democracy of choice. When one puts an article into an article directory, one must hope that a web publisher happens to be browsing the article directory where your article is published. In our approach, we strive to send your articles directly to the publishers / webmasters who are most likely to want to publish your articles.

We have established long-running relationships with publishers going back to 2001, and we are recognized as a company that consistently sends its publishers the most appropriate content to meet their desires. We have been complemented frequently for only sending content to publishers that they want to reproduce.

Because we hand select which publishers / webmasters we feel would appreciate receiving and publishing your articles, no two articles will have the exact same footprint in the algorithms of Google or any other search engine.

If you want to rely upon a cookie-cutter system for the distribution of your articles, then that will be your choice to do. But, if you are looking to also use a non-cookie-cutter article distribution service, then you should seriously consider also using The Phantom Writers for your article distributions.

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My name is Bill Platt and I would be happy to serve you for your article distribution needs. I have owned and operated ThePhantomWriters.com since its inception in 2001. I also operate the Links And Traffic Pay-For-Ranking Organic Link Building Service.