Dodgy Article Marketing - a new black hat?

By : Administrator
Published 19th July 2010 |
Read latest comment - 2nd January 2012

Writing informative articles, then getting them published on article directories has long been a way to market your business and generate some quality links.

But it looks like article directories are getting more and more watered down with rubbish. Everybody wants a short cut to success, and the latest lazy marketing technique I've come across is automated rewriting of your articles.

Look at the tag line of one dodgy looking app I found:

"Quickly Generate Hundreds Of Unique Versions of Your Article Using This Revolutionary Software!"

"Generates up to 250 spun versions of your article at a time into a ZIP file or automatically generates one spun version on screen that you can copy to the Windows clipboard."


End result, another 250 peices of internet garbage floating through the Search Engine index's.

Theres nothing wrong with a bit of link baiting, ie writing quality informative articles/blogs/content etc in the hope that people will deem it useful enough to link to, but using lazy techniques and trying to short cut the system will end in tears.

Maybe you'll get some short term benefit, but longterm, Google is always looking for ways to clean up the rubbish, and would you want your business name associated with some of this junk?

If you can't write copy, go find a copy writer or someone who can. People like Virtually Mary or Alby10 on this forum can help, or there are plenty of people out there.

Remember what they said at school, cheats dont prosper! Dam annoying when they do though

Steve Richardson
Gaffer of My Local Services
My Local Services | Me on LinkedIn
Comments
forum avatarGuest
19th July 2010 4:39 PM
I whole heartly agree with you on this - it makes my blood boil when companies try and cheat their way up the listings when the rest of us use pure bloody sweat and tears to get a decent entry on SERPs

forum avatarEmpire Web Designs
19th July 2010 8:28 PM
It also got me wondering... how long would it take a monkey sat at a computer to write some half decent content for wikipedia!

Just a thought

I thank you... although if anyone asks me to write two hundred and fifty versions of the same article, we're gonna need more Ben&Jerrys.

VirtuallyMary

This is exactly why Google brought out the Panda update. Only problem is that it hurts the site owners most rather than the authors.

So all those web 2.0 sites take a pasting whilst the spammers move along to the next niche - blogs like typepad and blogger etc.

highlandspring

As a newbie to article marketing, I'm still finding the conventions mystifying.

I thought what happened was you sent out an article to just one ezine directory, then any interested site owner customers of that directory published the item on their site(s) and that was it.

What seems to happen quite often in my very limited experience, though, is that the article in the first ezine directory is picked up by another ezine directory ... and so on, ad infinitum. In theory, the article might never reach sites flogging anything other than free articles and never be read by any human being. I wonder how often that happens?

Linda
CareersPartnershipUK

What seems to happen quite often in my very limited experience, though, is that the article in the first ezine directory is picked up by another ezine directory ... and so on, ad infinitum.

That was correct and it worked well until early 2010 - then the spammers started services - write a single article - spin it 100 times submit to 500 or 1000 sites.

That was the problem.

highlandspring

tch.... This has been going on for a while. I've seen sites advertise software for just about anything. Link building, article spinning, twitter followers, you name it.

They will always have a market for it because "certain" people are always going to want it done, ranked and making money yesterday. It's going to bite them in the nether regions soon enough.

Article spinning is wrong, on more than one level. If you don't have the time, get someone, a proper writer, to help you out.

To be honest lol I even tried one once, to see what the hype was all about. And it was nonsense. Utterly. There wasn't even a proper sentence structure, and it was so overloaded with keywords that it would have sent Google a straight heart attack. Needless to say the spun article and its app, wound up spending some time in my recycle bin before it was completely removed from my laptop.

The article's are unique all right, problem is you need to be either vulcan or martian to understand it.

Thanks,
Dreamraven

This is exactly why Google brought out the Panda update.

There we go, I moaned over a year a go and Google listened

Steve Richardson
Gaffer of My Local Services
My Local Services | Me on LinkedIn

After Google Panda update article marketing becomes little tough as it needs unique content. I haven't tried any software yet.. but is it really good to use software for this thing!!

I think you're missing the point nanvy, its the automated lazy short cut seo that caused all the problems in the first place.

The new buzz word just simply needs to be quality.

If you continue to churn out respun pure SEO targeted garbage, then the Google god will give you a kick up the bum.

Time for marketeers to raise their game, as online marketing, be it SEO or Social becomes more professional.

Steve Richardson
Gaffer of My Local Services
My Local Services | Me on LinkedIn

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