As most of you might know by now there has been a huge Google algorithm change called the Panda update aka farmer Update in the past month. There are lots of website owners discussing or complaining about this. To understand how the Google Panda update affected SEO and article marketing, it might be useful for you to first brush on the following broad concepts.
Article marketing is where you submit informative content to large article directories that will usually have a list of subscribers. Every time an article is published, it will be sent out to subscribers of that article directory which is why you often see a spike in traffic every time a good article is published.
Article marketing was also great for tapping into organic search engine traffic as Google used to love fresh content from article directories, which it used to rank very highly in the SERP’s or search engine ranking pages, even if the article did not have any backlinks to it. One could write a great article and see it on the first page of Google as soon as it was published.
Though article marketing was very successful in the past, the Google Panda update has changed that up quite drastically. Many of these article directories are abused by users who submit automatically spun content as articles. It is possible to use software to quickly spin one article into hundreds of slightly different articles. The Google Panda update caught up with this tactic and severely penalized article directory sites. Some of the article directory sites were labeled as content farms and no longer rank very highly on Google. Even several of the good article sites came under this blanket penalty as there are always a few users who manage to spam even the good article directories with very strict approval processes.
The same happened to websites that had a lot of software generated content. If you had a site with an auto blog or spun content, there is a good chance that you were heavily penalized by Google as well.
What can you do to rectify your existing article marketing work?
There are essentially two things you can do to quickly reverse the situation for your site if it has been affected by the Panda update.
- On site cleanup – Immediately remove any duplicate or spun content on your site. Do not worry if you have to take down a lot of pages with duplicate content. They are hurting your site’s rankings and Google will show you love if you remove it from your site.
- Off site cleanup – This is where you remove low quality backlinks from article sites. If you had used software to submit spun or duplicate content to hundreds of article directories, it is best that you remove these articles as each backlink from these low quality article directories will negatively affect your site’s rankings.
Quality content is the key
With Google’s new algorithm, quality content is king. If your site and your site’s backlinks have content that is 100% original and of very good quality, you will get the attention of Google in the form of high search engine rankings. Your future article marketing must only consist of submissions of original content to high quality article directories. If you have a guest blog, make sure that you monitor it for duplicate or spun control as you want to avoid them at all costs.
Leveraging Social Signals
You can improve the effectiveness of article marketing by leveraging it with social media marketing. Google has given increased importance to social marketing sites such as Twitter, facebook and other such sites. Leverage your future article marketing or even your existing article marketing resources on social media sites to get better recognition from Google.
Google shakes up things quite dramatically every now and then and their Panda update was a big one that has affected article marketing in a very big way, however as an online marketer who only works on quality sites with unique content, you should be more optimistic than ever!