Well, if the truth be known, Google has managed to penalize plenty of legitimate site owners along with some of the thin-site garbage manufacturers for sure, but the ones they really wanted to catch, the serial black hat spammers are still up to their old tricks and they're getting away with it too.
Article Marketing is Dead!
One way the hatters are still beating the system is by using article submission sites that everyone else believes are dead in the water. They're actually not!
Purists will harp on about how you must build super authority sites with thousands of pages of sterling quality content that is uber helpful and written for visitors, not search engines blah blah blah... But while the herd is chasing its collective tail looking for the righteous path to SE ranking again, the spammers are laughing up their sleeves (and making plenty of coin while they're about it).
Oh, you may have noticed I have brought this blog out of retirement (if anyone is actually reading this I'll be amazed...) after leaving it dormant for over 2 years. You might not have been around in the heady days of 2008/9 when a certain Ursine figure ran a blogger blog to the very top of the serps for the mega tough keywords like "make money" and "make money online".
Well I was there, I saw it happen and know how it happened. I was doing a similar thing in the weight loss niche using the very same tactics Mr Griz was using to stamp his authority on the MMO niche.
But that's not why I'm bothering to write this post here, or indeed why I'm even going to impart a little information about how to rank a website in these days of spam-link busting penguins and shoddy content eating pandas. I'm doing it because I want to note that article marketing still has its place in the grand scheme of things.
Not only that, but some of the die hard SEO-based Internet Marketers that have been in business for several years are starting to creep back into the limelight by telling all on how to rank post panda/penguin. They are telling how they've figured the algo out and know how to rank sites again with ease.
Staying Shtum!
I tend to keep pretty quiet about such things these days. I know as much if not more than those who are shouting it out from the blogtops, but I have preferred to keep my mouth shut and my fingers away from the keyboard with regard to explaining how this works. I like it that way.
Who wants to be known as an SEO guru anyway, when that label can come crashing down on your head at any moment. It can happen sooner rather than later once Google's Matt Cutts and his spam team turn their radar on you and decide that you know too much and you're blabbing about it too much.
Articles, Articles
But anyway, back to the reason for this post. Article submission sites, when used the right way, still work for ranking in the serps. They are a great way of mixing up your link anchors and diluting your over-optimized ones if you built too many pre-penguin and want to redress the balance.
They are also a great way to boost the authority of satellite sites that you own (or use web 2.0) that link to your bigger, authority sites. That's assuming you are building an authority site with millions of pages just to prove you can do it. It should work, because that what Google say they want to see in their index.
The reality is that it doesn't matter how great a site it, it can still be penalized and shot down to serp hell if someone in the right place decides to do it. But that's the topic for another post, if I can be bothered to do one for this irksome niche. Maybe I will and probably I won't. I don't really want to go telling tales and letting on what I know, now do I?
Resource
There are some great resources around online if you are considering re-entering the world of article submission to help boost the authority of your sites. You can find a huge selection of active article submission sites in several places online, or check out this page detailing how best to utilize such a resource here: article sites list. It contains a link to a large private list of high quality article directories in the list to choose from for submitting your articles to.
Cheers,
Terry
