Arrticle Marketing Services Are Dead - Long Live Article Writing

Shock! Horror! Article writing as we know it is finished and as for article marketing services - why bother? These were the initial thoughts of many when they heard of the much-maligned and misunderstood Panda algorithm of Google, often referred to as 'Farmer'. You could almost taste the fear of many who filled the forums and blogs with their comments on how badly this terrible act of Google was going to affect them.

Google Protects its Customers

All nonsense, of course, because Google generally does not harm those responsible for its existence, even if only marginally responsible, but it does protect those people it regards as its customers. These are those for whom Google is a tool to find information - not those using the search engine as a marketing tool or to advertise!

If you are using article directories to promote your articles, or are providing useful information on your web pages, then article writing and article marketing services will continue to offer the benefits they always have provided you with as a promotional tool, but they will be even more effective due to the lack of low-quality competition. Naturally, your websites will have to offer useful information, although dedicated sales sites are still regarded as providing Google customers with a service. So what is the reason for the introduction of this change in the search algorithm in February?

The Panda-Farmer Algorithm Update

Even though the dust has settled, and everybody has had their two cents worth of comments and explanations, there is still a great deal of misunderstanding. I am sure that many will disagree what I write here. It is their right to do so, but as an article ghostwriter of good standing and many years experience I guess my opinion is just as worth expressing as that of anybody else out there.

Google's intention was not to target article writing or article marketing services, and you can still use articles as a promotional tool to sell your products and attract traffic to your websites. Google is targeting the masses of poorly-written articles and web pages, in short:

• Articles spun from a master article

• Bad rewrites of PLR articles

• Poor article writing offering little benefit to the reader

• Articles offering little information, designed only to get clicks to sales pages

• Very short articles with fewer than 400 words

• Articles with significant spelling errors

• Articles written with very poor grammar

• Software-generated articles taken from scraped web content

In short, Google is attempting to improve the quality of content being provided to its customers who are seeking useful information. This was content in the form of both web page content and published articles. Google does not want their users to find the same information on page after page, even if it is wrtitten in slightly different ways. The last thing that will impress them is finding badly written text that is practically unreadable.

If the alternative names given to the algorithm update are confusing, the name Panda was given to it by Google itself, after the engineer who created it. The name Farmer was given to it by others because it appeared to them to be targeting the so-called 'content farms'. This was not exactly true, although content farms appeared to be affected mostly due to the relatively poor content that many of them (but not all) had to offer.

The Future of Article Marketing Services

Article marketing services are going strong, and you can still promote your web pages by publishing well-written articles of reasonable length that provide useful content that is related to the title. It's important that any clickable links in the article or its resource section takes readers to a web page that is directly related to the topic of your article - this is another important factor of good article writing that many people do not seem to understand.

Another is that their articles should be written naturally and not stuffed with keywords. Even using a 1% keyword density could be regarded as excessive now. Keyword-stuffing became extinct when Google introduced its LSI (latent semantic indexing) algorithm update. Writing naturally is the key to high listings for a good, informative article.

Response of Article Directories

The reaction of article directories was to tighten up on their editorial guidelines. Many article directories have reviewed their conditions and have increased the minimum word count to 400 words (some think that even too low) and you will now find it more difficult to have your articles accepted for publication on many directories. The are giving closer inspection to the quality of content and grammar.

Many people have taken the view that article writing is dead as a promotional tool just because their articles are being refused by some article directories, and because they have been unable to adapt to this they believe that article marketing services are finished as a marketing tool. Nothing could be more wrong. On the contrary, it is now significantly easier to achieve high listings in the Google results pages for your articles, since the vast majority of substandard articles and web pages have been removed from the search engine index.

Article writing services are as alive as they have ever been, and article writing is still an extremely useful and potent tool in internet marketing.


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For more information on the Google Panda-Farmer algorithm update and how article writing can help promote your website check out Pete's site at Article Services here he will also show you how to use his article marketing services to sell your products.