Article Landfills

Article syndication is out of control. It is vastly overwhelming to think about all the ways available to get yourself that all important backlink via an article posted to some shitty directory that nobody visits or some blog that nobody reads. Email came through recently that The Keyword Academy is going pro with their blog distribution service and changing the name to PostRunner. I also received a double shot for Article and Blog Blueprint. That’ll be $67/month for either service. And of course there is AMA, Article Underground and their blog network. UAW. And the list grows larger every day.

At what point does Google or the other search engines finally determine that these systems are creating article landfills? Tomorrow? Next year? 5 years from now? Never?

There is basically one directory that has content that is remotely worthwhile. That is EzineArticles. You can actually get people to follow the dinky link you put in the resource box. Hell I backlink TO my Ezine Articles from OTHER articles.

Unless you are on the PPC side you are being told to write. Write. And write some more. “They” are saying you should be writing 150 to 250 articles a month. Or getting them outsourced. You should be spinning them. Putting them on Squidoo. Blogs. Directories. That is just the way it works in this stupid ass business we are in.

As little as  a couple of years ago it was enough to promote your latest masterpiece by posting an article on GoArticles and EzineArticles. Maybe ping the services that something is happening and put your site on some directories. How times have changed.

I think niche marketing is dysfunctional. Yet this is our normal. We now manufacture bogus interest in our sites via article distribution. No one would ever dream of naturally linking to your niche site. NO-freakin-BODY. Your content is boring, useless, if not completely suckass. (It’s the model we chase. Money making sites are boring and useless by design with profitable click-outs, you know. Otherwise you’re stuck with a “social” site) So you have to buy interest. Enter AMA. PostRunner. Article Blueprint. MAS, et al.

Those blogs and directories within those systems are mostly crap. They are not personal. They have no soul. No life. Just a jumble of well placed words (sort of like, in my opinion, most niche blogs slung on the web). When have you actually seen an article you’ve written be ranked (high) on a search engine from an blog article collection point or article directory? Not often I contend with exception to EzineArticle, of course. But the consensus is that you have to have thousands of backlinks to your site to rank in Google. So you spin your articles and pay $97 $67/month to get backlinks using mediocre articles to blogs and directories nobody will ever visit. Except, you hope, the interweb robots.

I have blogs in the AMA system collecting articles from folks. I used to participate in TKA’s article distribution system. The articles that come through are sterile. Boring. Non-educational. I expect nothing less. But when do these offerings mean little to the Google god? Maybe never. But blog commenting is now considered mostly worthless. Will article distribution find the same fate? I don’t know. I’m not smart enough to know, or care, about the Google algorithms. I just know crap when I see it and article distribution is your basic crap. But then again fertilizer is crap yet useful so what do I know.

I will continue to play the game. I will build simple XSP micro niche sites filled with eBay offerings. I will build Squidoo sites and Hubpages and promote them via the article distribution sites. AMA and MAS are my chosen tools for spamming my backlink articles. The model is flimsy in my opinion, the work gets harder by the day, but as long as I can continue to make a little money I’ll stick with it.

I can tell you that I would rather have a single outstanding authority site link to my site naturally than all the backlinks I could collect from all the article directory and blog distribution centers put together. To do that requires remarkable content. Would you ever put remarkable content through the article distribution systems? I would argue no, because you know the systems are your basic landfills. You save the good stuff for Squidoo, Hubpages and Ezine Articles (Well, at least I do because I hope to make money with those platforms). You cannibalize the good stuff to send to the landfills.  Funny, we pay to get crap articles syndicated for mediocre niche sites but the good stuff distributes for free organically. It’s a crazy business.

Tagged as: Article Marketing