Internet Marketing with Josh SpauldingMaking Money through Ethical Internet Marketing.

47 comments

1. Bob (2 comments.)
   3rd March, 2011 at 3:10 pm 

   Good post Josh!
   As always, those who spent the extra time to make quality web sites will go to the top. Junk and auto blogging type sites will disappear. Quality content and backlinks will always be the best use of time!

2. Onefineham internet marketing (1 comments.)
   3rd March, 2011 at 3:13 pm 

   Josh-

   Couldn’t agree more. I have had multiple articles published SINCE the google beat down and they were still indexed quickly and ranked appropriately. Those programs telling people to blast their content out to ever directory on the web are feeling some pain now. I’m not.

   Barry (a.k.a. Onefineham)

   PS. Here’s more on the ezine changes:
   http://become-a-wealthy-affiliate.com/ezine-articles-help/

3. John Mauldin (1 comments.)
   3rd March, 2011 at 3:16 pm 

   We don’t like making a search to find something and get a ton of crappy sites obscuring the real sites that provide the source of information we need, yet, too often, many of us fill up the net with crap sites that are really focused on “making money now rather than planning and developing our business around long term. All of us that participate in internet marketing are blessed. The old ways of knocking on doors, etc., etc. have changed and made it easier to start and grow our businesses, but like anything else, we have to respect ourselves, our businesses and the internet as a whole if we can expect to grow and prosper.

4. Roger Shann (1 comments.)
   3rd March, 2011 at 3:18 pm 

   Many thanks.
   You are not the first I have read about the Google farm update . There seems a lot of activity in the forums.
   Most seem to be of the same opinion that the best sites such as EZA will come back in time. Hopefully the dross will fade (but I doubt they will disappear completely).
   Roger

5. Todd Bobal (2 comments.)
   3rd March, 2011 at 3:22 pm 

   One of the first books I bought was AMD and have been following your ‘Rule’ for all of my article marketing ever since…thanks again Josh!

   Todd Bobal

6. Paul Guzman (5 comments.)
   3rd March, 2011 at 3:29 pm 

   Oh yea…Been getting tons of email from others about “farmer websites”. However some of these are from folks who are actually marketing, advertising or have these same b.s. sites.

   Thanks for the Info Josh. Your sites are NOT in this category.
   Paul

7. Rika Susan Weight Loss Juicing (28 comments.)
   3rd March, 2011 at 3:36 pm 

   Good advice, as always Josh! Value-adding original content will always be a winner in this game!

8. Ron - SEO Sales Copywriting | Web Content Writing | Blogging (11 comments.)
   3rd March, 2011 at 3:38 pm 

   It seems I am the first guy who checks your post most of the time! Ha ha…But to be honest, you are not the first I heard it from Chris Crum talked about “civilian casualties” as well. Anyway. I guess, this is for good in the long run.

9. Leonard Aberts (4 comments.)
   3rd March, 2011 at 3:49 pm 

   Great post Josh! Thanks to Google, we may get even better ranking for our sites (as long as they are good content sites). Of course, someone will be coming out with a course on how to “cheat” the new Google system….

10. steven sherin (1 comments.)
    3rd March, 2011 at 3:57 pm 

    Another throw the baby out with the bath water solution by Google.

    While it is obvious Google’s first priority must be to deliver quality search content to its readers their solution is far from perfect.

    I dont think they are as savy as they would have us believe and dont know the full effects of an algo change until after the fact.

    Many good sites went down while many crap ones remained and some even moved up.

    Google is simply too big to handle this manually and bots are unpredictable because they are not human.

    I have a news site with 500 unique quality articles that has just disappeared. While it has had adsense on it in the past there wasn’t any on it for months prior to the change. If this is a content farm then I am Old MacDonald.

    AdSense is their creation and they make a killing on it. If you are big enough you will skate through this but small sites will be eaten.

    Now they admit they have done some damage but if you have ever tried to deal with them as a webmaster all I can say is good luck.

    They do what they want, step on who they want and make vague rules, often not even telling you what you did wrong.

    Google has become too big and they need to be taken down. They have a monopoly on the internet. I dont want to see the govt involved in this for sure.
    But they are a lot like Bell an ATT back in the day. Once they were gone, despite all the fears people had of anarchy, everyone was better off. Competition brought better phones and lower rates. Maybe that is what we need in the search engines.

    Steve

11. forex trading robots reviews
    3rd March, 2011 at 4:18 pm 

    Excuse my ignorance, but why is not good to post articles in hundreds of article directories?
    Thanks

12. Quibids Review
    3rd March, 2011 at 4:30 pm 

    I doubt the likes of Ezinearticles will ever come back to the top pages of Google. It is not just the cheap content of the future that is a problem to Google: It is also that of the past. I think there is just too much junk already posted on these sites and like it or not, it makes sense to devalue that content. Really, it is very hard to learn something new from an Ezinearticle however well it is written. Google needs to make a choice between really helpful content (its original purpose) and less helpful content on “authority” sites. Something like Wikipedia does both. However, that is certainly the exception. Throw in millions of dollars a month and you have a perfect way to degenerate search results beyond usefulness. I don’t think Google bashers really know what they are talking about simply because all they care for is the money. Google cannot survive if this is all it cares for. The day Google fails to deliver exactly what people want, it just goes down. No one cares.

13. Scott N Smith (1 comments.)
    3rd March, 2011 at 4:31 pm 

    Josh, Great post. Tell me if I have misunderstood you at some point. I was under the impression having gone through AMD and using DLP that you see some value in:

    1- sending some articles to a list of hundreds of directories, albeit occasionally. I’m remembering a rotation schedule?

    2- Mass submission to site directories (deep links included) for backlinking

    Have you changed your view on these, did I misunderstand or is there a nuance in this whole thing where these two help but don’t hurt with Google even now?

    Thanks, bro, for always posting insightful and helpful stuff. Not being a hater here, just trying to get clear on what to do and what not to do.

14. Adam Hansen
    3rd March, 2011 at 4:34 pm 

    Josh,

    You say in AMD to split your articles up; using half of them to submit to the 5 top article directory sites and use the other half to submit to 20-30 lower PR sites to get the backlinks.

    Your post makes it sound different; like you don’t think submitting articles just for the backlink is worth it.

    Do you still stick by this strategy or have you altered it in light of the update or other factors?

    Because of the “slap” have you adjusted your rankings of the article directory sites at all?

15. Josh Spaulding
    3rd March, 2011 at 5:16 pm 

    @ forex trading – There aren’t hundreds of quality article directories, so most will not even be indexed. And in the case of this post, it will raise a red flag with google.

    @ Scott – I’ve never in my life recommended to anything that submitting articles to hundreds of sites is a good thing. There is value in submitting sites to web directories (no content is involved… different than article directories.)

    @ Adam – You are correct… that is what I teach in AMD and it will be updated slightly. I change it to simple “submit all of your articles to a handful of the top article directories.” But for those who have been submitting half of their articles to the top 20-30 sites they should not see any penalties after this update. That’s what I’ve been doing for years and none of my sites were affected. I will still reduce the recommendation just to be on the safe side though.

    My main thing is many people go overboard and submit to hundreds, or thousands of article directories, which has never been a good idea and now it’s much more obvious.

16. Stef (68 comments.)
    3rd March, 2011 at 5:28 pm 

    Typo Josh?

    “a site full of content that was created for the sole reason to make advertising money.”… Now isn’t your german site made for making Adsense money? And are its rankings hit by google? Probably not Maybe you forgot the word “copied” before the word content?

    Google is after the ones that are not contributing to a better web experience, and yes, ‘them copy paste sites’ are feeling it.

    Now they should find a way to get around the wikipedia pages

17. Bridget
    3rd March, 2011 at 5:30 pm 

    Hey Josh,

    I have been following you for quite some time. Thanks for always giving us these updates. I have heard this and received an email regarding the changes to ezine article directory.

18. Josh Spaulding
    3rd March, 2011 at 5:34 pm 

    @ Stef – No, that was not a typo. My Germany site is full of very useful information. It was not created solely to earn adsense income, Adsense is one of the monetization models. Just because a site is monetized by adsense does not mean the site was created solely for that income.

19. Pete
    3rd March, 2011 at 8:20 pm 

    Josh, I only use ezinearticles, and have found their different instructive emails very handy. I have no trouble filling the 400 word requirement, more the opposite

20. Anne
    3rd March, 2011 at 9:18 pm 

    Hi Josh,

    Thank you for a useful, informative post. The old saying ‘what goes around comes around’ springs to mind – I agree with the comment above that reminds us we don’t want to have to wade through tons of tedious dross in search of good information, so we should act accordingly.

    I was aware but hadn’t read up yet – so yours was the first post I read. Thanks again.

21. Bernie Gilmour
    3rd March, 2011 at 10:25 pm 

    @ steven sherin

    “I have a news site with 500 unique quality articles that has just disappeared. While it has had adsense on it in the past there wasn’t any on it for months prior to the change. If this is a content farm then I am Old MacDonald.”

    Correct me if I’m wrong.. but isn’t a news site merely an accumulator of news from other sources? Unless you source information unique to yourself, no matter how ‘unique’ each article is, wouldn’t it be likely that Google would see this as a form of duplicate content – a content farm?

    Any thoughts on this matter would be helpful to my understanding of this issue!

22. online merchant account (2 comments.)
    3rd March, 2011 at 11:14 pm 

    Yeah, I think Content is still the king an you are right ezine is now more tight with their approval

23. Eric : Manila Blog (5 comments.)
    4th March, 2011 at 12:33 am 

    This same goes also for those who are using PLR to fill-up their blogs. Make sure to spin the article according to your “own voice”.

24. Matt
    4th March, 2011 at 12:51 am 

    Will this affect your deep linker software?

25. Bazil Osevin (1 comments.)
    4th March, 2011 at 2:42 am 

    Great post Josh, I must be doing something right because my blog on persuasive techniques jumped from page 15 on Google to page two almost overnight.

26. Adam Hansen
    4th March, 2011 at 3:03 am 

    @Josh
    “But for those who have been submitting half of their articles to the top 20-30 sites they should not see any penalties after this update. That’s what I’ve been doing for years and none of my sites were affected. I will still reduce the recommendation just to be on the safe side though.”

    I assume you are talking about getting referring traffic from article marketing. What about if you’re just using it for the link building?

    If you know that you’re going after low PR directory links, what do you care if Google doesn’t rank them high?

    Or am I missing something?

    @steven sherin
    I think you might be getting confused with the update Google started on the 24th of Jan.

    They started knocking scraped sites with massive duplicate content. If you’re reposting news stories, that sounds like the culprit right there.

27. Internet Specialist Mark (10 comments.)
    4th March, 2011 at 7:18 am 

    Hey Josh

    Although the “Farmer” update has been mentioned by many other internet marketers, your simple explanation backed by your own results offers the clearest interpretation of what has happened

    Yeah, we can analyze this all we want but in the end, creating a great website with good content that engages and provides value to its visitors is what we should all focus on.

    It’s always tempting to jump on every niche we see and try to squeeze some profit out of it by taking advantage of some loophole but we all want search engine results full of great, relevant content so why not do just that?

    Foundational internet marketing techniques like article marketing will always be a part of ranking websites accordingly…at least until the search engines change their algorithms. So we all should continue to do this in the way that you have described and we should reap the benefits..

    Working within a professional SEO company, I’m of the opinion that with the ever rising importance of “social media” and more specifically, the social interaction of a website will be more important than all of the old school SEO techniques we have been employing. What do you think?

    As always Josh, you’ve got all of us thinking as demonstrated by the insightful comments by everyone here.

    Keep it up!
    Mark

28. Josh Spaulding
    4th March, 2011 at 1:27 pm 

    @ Matt – No, this will not affect web directory links/sites.

    @ Adam – I’m going for both direct traffic and the backlinks. If you submit to a bunch of low-quality sites you’re just making your content less and less unique. I don’t believe in a duplicate content penalty, but I do believe google gives less weight to content that has been duplicated among hundreds of sites, most of low quality.

29. Angie Berg (52 comments.)
    5th March, 2011 at 10:30 am 

    I haven’t done a lot of article marketing so I haven’t worried about that side of things, but I was very happy to see that my sites haven’t suffered as a result of the content farm shake-up.

    I think perhaps one my sites has taken a slight hit, but I suspect it’s more from the simultaneous release of the new rich formatting introduced for recipe sites. Hopefully the slight dip in traffic will only be temporary as things balance out and equilibrium is resumed.

30. Garth (1 comments.)
    6th March, 2011 at 5:07 pm 

    I’ve read some very long discussions on this newest “farmer” update, but you can still feel special because you managed to make some very good points on how it relates to article marketing is a few short paragraphs!

31. Inger (1 comments.)
    7th March, 2011 at 12:50 am 

    Hi Josh
    Yours is not the first blog/forum post I have read on this subject but, true to form, you keep it clear and concise.
    Over the years you have cultivated white hat methods that people can trust, regardless of the changes Google brings in to clean up the internet.
    Thanks again.
    Inger

32. Oneal Degrassi (1 comments.)
    7th March, 2011 at 8:03 pm 

    Hi Josh,

    What are your thoughts concerning other content marketing sites like gather.com or helium.com? Do you feel they fall into the same category as the typical article repository?

    Never posted here before – just been lurking.

    Oneal

33. Josh Spaulding
    8th March, 2011 at 12:14 pm 

    @ Oneal – They’re basically the same thing for the most part. But it’s not what I think that matters. It’s what Google things and I have no idea what they think.

34. Gary (4 comments.)
    8th March, 2011 at 3:29 pm 

    Hi Josh,

    Just wondered, how do you know “many top article directories took a hit from this new update because of all of the people who submit the same article to hundreds of article directories.”?

    How do you know it’s to do with duplication and not just the fact that these directories contain tons of thin, poor quality pages – or are you saying thin, poor quality pages are always the result of multiple directory submissions?

35. Elsie @Toshiba LV505
    8th March, 2011 at 7:31 pm 

    couldn’t agree more Josh.

    I’ve seen big increases in traffic.

    Lots of articles in the article directories are crap so there’s nothing for the average writer or better than average writer to worry about here.

    Just write good articles! That is simply too simple for some people!

    

36. Anne (2 comments.)
    13th March, 2011 at 7:51 am 

    I have always found Ezine’s ‘strict’ guidelines amusing, especially when you read some of the articles on the site – poor sentence structure, bad grammar and even worse spelling have been approved by their editors for years. It’s time these articles and others that offer no value in terms of content be removed. On another note, we have had affiliates copy and paste the code from a home page on one of our sites and use it as is – to the detriment of our traffic. Google and Clickbank were extremely helpful in getting their site removed – but there are thousands of sites doing the exact same thing. Why should our site – which is 100% original – be punished for other’s actions? We are still trying to recover the traffic we originally had on the site.

37. Farmer aka Panda Algorithm Update | Techieshelp.com |IT Problems
    13th March, 2011 at 5:17 pm 

    [...] Google’s “Farmer” Update Confirms my Article Marketing Theories (Internet Marketing) [...]

38. Craig (1 comments.)
    13th March, 2011 at 6:32 pm 

    I watch the SERP for my website quite closely and am amazed at the changes of the last few weeks…lots of new sites i’ve never seen before suddenly jumped up into the top ten…but the truth is, after looking at them all that has happened is new made for adsense sites have replaced old made for adsense sites so I can’t honestly see how Google have improved anything….

39. Fazal Mayar
    15th March, 2011 at 6:47 am 

    Great stuff, keep it up Josh! you are an ethical marketer because ive had a look at your different products on Clickbank and all had good ratings.

40. Uniform scrub
    24th March, 2011 at 5:32 am 

    Hey Josh,
    Indeed, content is king when it comes to articles. But come to think of it, The Big Panda/Farmer Update could help to create a more vibrant and informative web than before. Though, it had affected so many sites and have so many losers especially those article sites (Ezinearticle, Aticlesbase,Buzzle.com) and even the Hubpages and many more, it also created a content based articles and sites, eh.

41. Chris Adams (1 comments.)
    24th March, 2011 at 6:27 pm 

    Definitely agree on the deep linking – helps indexing, ranking, and to look more natural. Although I’ve found that just submitting an article to a size like Ezine isn’t enough, that article needs some link love as well, i.e. social bookmarks or something similar.

42. John Brite
    26th March, 2011 at 11:22 am 

    Hi Josh
    this is my first visit on your blog and found a very helpful and useful info and i would like you to say THANKS and keep it up
    thanks

43. Luke
    26th March, 2011 at 9:47 pm 

    Excellent post good thing I don’t have any adsense sites. I got banned from adsense a long time ago..

44. Juhani Tontti
    31st March, 2011 at 7:07 am 

    Good post and useful link to Leger`s site. I have a question concerning the dublicate content and the article submission softwares and services. Should I now submit one original article to each directory, then to rewrite it at least 30% before submitting to another and so forth? Is it stupid to use any submission softwares to submit to hundreds of sites?

    Thanks

    Juhani

45. Crystal
    20th April, 2011 at 12:10 pm 

    Thanks Josh,

    Although I had already heard about the Google algorithm update, you are the first person to actually explain what a content farm was. I kept seeing the term, but no real explanation.

    Crystal

46. kate (4 comments.)
    2nd August, 2011 at 12:28 pm 

    Honestly, I don’t know but seems that Ezine that used to be a reliable directory is now full of crap articles. They used to be too tight with someone who would post their articles there.

47. Tyronne Ratcliff (8 comments.)
    4th November, 2012 at 4:03 pm 

    Thanks for the helpful tips Josh, this goes to show that no one is immune to the changes Google makes to it’s ranking algorithm. Even a site like ezinearticles.com should be penalized as well,they do run adsense ads on their article directory, but at the same time we as small business owners have to adhere to the same standards. Gone are the days of loading up a crappy article into AMR and blasting it out to a few thousand article directories.