A post over on GreyWolf’s blog asks how people are doing with their rankings on sites that they use article syndication sites to market. I’m rather fond of article marketing, and use Article Marketer to submit my articles.

So how am I doing?

I would say I get adequate but not spectacular results so far. This may change over time. I have a new site that I’m experimenting with pure article marketing on, and it does rank already at #5 for what I would consider to be a moderately competitive keyword. It’s about two months old, so it could just be the luck of being new and vanish utterly in a few weeks. We’ll just have to see.

I am giving that site content unique from the articles I submit for it. The idea is for the articles to encourage people to come to the site for more information. However, the articles are reasonably complete in and of themselves. I still want to give enough that site owners might possibly feel comfortable publishing the articles.

I’ve only published two articles for that site so far. One I found 21 results for so far. Most are junk sites, quite frankly, and it was not uncommon to no longer see anything from my article on that site. They often just feed from RSS, I believe, so nothing sticks for long. But others are adequate links, and the article has not been out for long.

I can tell you from experience in tracking articles using Google Alerts that my submitted articles continue to be indexed in various places for a long time. When I want to track an article I set up an Alert on a unique phrase within the article so that I know when Google finds it. I can then check to see if the link is included or no.

My older sites that I use article marketing on are certainly not falling in the rankings. Some are in highly competitive areas and have maintained their rankings.

I think there are a few factors involved in the decrease in the power of article marketing, but I don’t think it’s dead yet.

The first thing that has caused problems is all the junk people write and submit to article directories. They slap together a quick article, no care for how useful it is, just so long as they can get their keywords in.

Combine this with article directories that don’t have at least minimal quality requirements, and there’s just way too much junk out there. Ezine publishers get frustrated and no longer find articles to be of use to them.

Then there are the scrapers, who do nothing but use RSS or scripts to take articles and throw them onto their sites, often without the resource boxes and/or links to the author’s website. This frustrates many of the authors, especially if they are trying to build a real business.

It can be frustrating seeing a great marketing technique become more difficult to use. I don’t consider it useless, but I do think you have to think harder when you do your article marketing. I still like using Article Marketer, as it does give a broad distribution, but I’m also looking more at targeted distribution. I know people still use articles written by other people; it’s a matter of getting them to use yours now.

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