Do you recommend article marketing as an SEO strategy and how are the backlinks treated when other websites republish the same article? Jeff, Orange County, CA Russian subtitles translated by Mike Shakin. Have a question? Ask it in our Webmaster Help Forum: www.google.com Want your question to be answered on a video like this? Follow us on Twitter and look for an announcement when we take new questions: twitter.com More videos: www.youtube.com Webmaster Central Blog: googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com Webmaster Central: www.google.com
Hi Matt,
First of all, I want to thank you for sharing so much information with all of us who are trying to comply with Google Webmaster Tools Guidelines.
I would like to ask you a short and brief question;
I have submitted several sitemaps to google webmasters tools and I get the impression google has not crawled my site for some time now.
What can I do? Gracias from Costa Rica
What Google doesn’t tell you is that article marketing does work. Blog articles is a great method of article marketing. Having a niche and also writing great content is the key. We also appreciate the value of article marketing that maintains a holistic approach vs the synonym swap junk on the web.
Can Anyone Help Me With This?
i have a finance website (apnaloan.com).
before google made an algo change (panda update) my site’s sub page (apnaloan.com/home-loan-india/rates.html) was ranking 1st and 2nd for “home loan” keyword in google.co.in.
But after this panda update, when you search for “home loan” in google.co.in, (apnaloan.com/car-loan-india/rates.html) is showing up!
kindly help.
I dont understand how he says that Google wants natural back linking. 1- Natural back links (or Natural promotion) by creating a twitter account and hope that people start following back to your site? This could take forever or if ever at all. 2- Why would Matt say to get back links from social sites like Twitter or Facebook when both are NoFollow links from both sites. NoFollow for those who dont know what it is, means the google spiders wont follow from any site back to your site (no credit).
I’ve been doing my own SEO for our business for the last 5 years I’ve always followed the Google recommend rules of relevant content, no games spell it out for the customer. Google has always treated our site very well in search results.
I stumbled across this article marketing and thought it would be good to give us a boast, but seeing this video confirms the one rule we’ve been following for the last 5 years, give original well thought out content and don’t play games.
WHOA! Matt, I know this is about using AM as an SEO technique, but your definition is completely WRONG! What you describe is spamming article directories for backlinks – that’s Google’s fault. Article Marketing is about building trust, branding, prequalifying traffic and sharing great content. Yes, some directories are spam farms, but some are still doing everything they can to uphold a level of quality as high as possible. It is still a viable and profitable marketing technique.
@JonathanRElder I’ve done several press releases with companies like Vocus and PR Web and the article has been unaltered by any of the websites or agencies that pick it up
@wackywireless No necessarily – most press releases are re-written to give a local flavour, to tie in with other news or to put across the writers viewpoint. This means the articles are unique, and not just repetition – they actually add something.
By the time you add in the ability for readers to post comments and feedback, the page will have a lot of unique content that should (and will) be valid for adding to the index.
Google should go for the perfect index ie “no results”. Think about it, it would be perfect. You would use almost 0 power and you could fire all your coders and increase your profit ten fold, which is what drives all your “updates” anyway. Oh wait then people wont come to google anymore… hmm let me think about it a bit more.
Well, until article marketing stops working, I’m gonna keep doing it! There are GOOD article directories that have good quality articles. Google is about great content. I get good results by writing good articles. After the latest Google shuffle, my sites all improved in their ranks. I attribute that to well written site content AND well written articles that rank well on their own and of course…blogging.
It’s not my experience that article marketing fails to give excellent Google listings, and nor have any of my listed articles suffered since Panda. Matt Cutts is focusing on links here and the benefits of articles to Google PageRank.
Matt Cutts heads up Googles web spam team , so his comments will naturally focus on the negatives of article marketing, largely connected with low-quality Adsense sites using scraped articles as content. That falls exactly withing his remit.
@miketjstradley
Your site is NOT being penalised! It is simply not being ‘artificially’ inflated, by the use on other sites of your content. Just think – if there are scores of sites out there with COPIED content, then that can only be bad for the end user – the visitor! There are too many sites that take the easy way out. No need to help them usurp your own position. It’s almost as bad as ‘Vanity Publishing’. The Web – for the sake of quality – does not need it.
Regards
Will sites that use article marketing be penalized or will their rank just naturally drop as the links from articles are devalued? Should site owners with articles containing their link remove them from content farms to avoid loss of rank? Will a site that doesn’t do any article marketing lose rank if they start using it? Please make this absolutely clear Matt.
The point should not be to get your article republished on hundreds of low quality sites. The point should be to get each article published on a different high quality site, each with unique content and unique anchor text.
@miketjstradley Then you shouldn’t see problem regarding the new Algo. Because the new aglo is targeting only those two things: Content farms and Scrapper sites. And yes, Google bots certainly know which are quality and which are not, otherwise how could they concentrate more on filtering the content on the web.
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
Hi Matt,
First of all, I want to thank you for sharing so much information with all of us who are trying to comply with Google Webmaster Tools Guidelines.
I would like to ask you a short and brief question;
I have submitted several sitemaps to google webmasters tools and I get the impression google has not crawled my site for some time now.
What can I do? Gracias from Costa Rica
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
Article Marketing has become lot more tough.
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
and that’s how Matt Cuts killed EzineArticles!
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
What Google doesn’t tell you is that article marketing does work. Blog articles is a great method of article marketing. Having a niche and also writing great content is the key. We also appreciate the value of article marketing that maintains a holistic approach vs the synonym swap junk on the web.
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
Can Anyone Help Me With This?
i have a finance website (apnaloan.com).
before google made an algo change (panda update) my site’s sub page (apnaloan.com/home-loan-india/rates.html) was ranking 1st and 2nd for “home loan” keyword in google.co.in.
But after this panda update, when you search for “home loan” in google.co.in, (apnaloan.com/car-loan-india/rates.html) is showing up!
kindly help.
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
I dont understand how he says that Google wants natural back linking. 1- Natural back links (or Natural promotion) by creating a twitter account and hope that people start following back to your site? This could take forever or if ever at all. 2- Why would Matt say to get back links from social sites like Twitter or Facebook when both are NoFollow links from both sites. NoFollow for those who dont know what it is, means the google spiders wont follow from any site back to your site (no credit).
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
article marketing only good for building traffic not SEO specially after Panda update
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
I’ve been doing my own SEO for our business for the last 5 years I’ve always followed the Google recommend rules of relevant content, no games spell it out for the customer. Google has always treated our site very well in search results.
I stumbled across this article marketing and thought it would be good to give us a boast, but seeing this video confirms the one rule we’ve been following for the last 5 years, give original well thought out content and don’t play games.
Thanks Matt
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
WHOA! Matt, I know this is about using AM as an SEO technique, but your definition is completely WRONG! What you describe is spamming article directories for backlinks – that’s Google’s fault. Article Marketing is about building trust, branding, prequalifying traffic and sharing great content. Yes, some directories are spam farms, but some are still doing everything they can to uphold a level of quality as high as possible. It is still a viable and profitable marketing technique.
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
Great vid Go-sour staff going to release SEO tutorial in the next few days, they all say it is going to be the bomb
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
great answer thanks
. Also article marketing has terrible ROI
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
@JonathanRElder I’ve done several press releases with companies like Vocus and PR Web and the article has been unaltered by any of the websites or agencies that pick it up
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
@wackywireless No necessarily – most press releases are re-written to give a local flavour, to tie in with other news or to put across the writers viewpoint. This means the articles are unique, and not just repetition – they actually add something.
By the time you add in the ability for readers to post comments and feedback, the page will have a lot of unique content that should (and will) be valid for adding to the index.
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
I havent listened to ANYTHING Matt Cutts saids EVER and you can still find me on page 1 of Google.
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
Google should go for the perfect index ie “no results”. Think about it, it would be perfect. You would use almost 0 power and you could fire all your coders and increase your profit ten fold, which is what drives all your “updates” anyway. Oh wait then people wont come to google anymore… hmm let me think about it a bit more.
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
Well, until article marketing stops working, I’m gonna keep doing it! There are GOOD article directories that have good quality articles. Google is about great content. I get good results by writing good articles. After the latest Google shuffle, my sites all improved in their ranks. I attribute that to well written site content AND well written articles that rank well on their own and of course…blogging.
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
Great Idea MAtt give more power to your biggest competitor? WOnder how long it will take before FB will be in a position to buy out google.
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
bla bla bla, no direct answer as always
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
It’s not my experience that article marketing fails to give excellent Google listings, and nor have any of my listed articles suffered since Panda. Matt Cutts is focusing on links here and the benefits of articles to Google PageRank.
Matt Cutts heads up Googles web spam team , so his comments will naturally focus on the negatives of article marketing, largely connected with low-quality Adsense sites using scraped articles as content. That falls exactly withing his remit.
Cheers,
Pete
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
@miketjstradley
Your site is NOT being penalised! It is simply not being ‘artificially’ inflated, by the use on other sites of your content. Just think – if there are scores of sites out there with COPIED content, then that can only be bad for the end user – the visitor! There are too many sites that take the easy way out. No need to help them usurp your own position. It’s almost as bad as ‘Vanity Publishing’. The Web – for the sake of quality – does not need it.
Regards
Data
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
Sounds clear enough!
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
what about press releases? Associated Press And Reuters are all about duplicate content
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
Will sites that use article marketing be penalized or will their rank just naturally drop as the links from articles are devalued? Should site owners with articles containing their link remove them from content farms to avoid loss of rank? Will a site that doesn’t do any article marketing lose rank if they start using it? Please make this absolutely clear Matt.
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
The point should not be to get your article republished on hundreds of low quality sites. The point should be to get each article published on a different high quality site, each with unique content and unique anchor text.
[Translate]
June 10, 2011 at 12:02 am
@miketjstradley Then you shouldn’t see problem regarding the new Algo. Because the new aglo is targeting only those two things: Content farms and Scrapper sites. And yes, Google bots certainly know which are quality and which are not, otherwise how could they concentrate more on filtering the content on the web.
[Translate]