Google's recent "Panda" algorithm update seems to have hit some popular article directories really hard. Among them are two directories which I use on a regular basis... Ezinearticles and Buzzle.

This is just another indication that article marketing is less effective than it was just a few years ago. In addition, last year's Google "Mayday" update also hit long-tail searches extremely hard, often de-ranking many articles which typically pop up in Google SERPS.

Since Google is the source of 60% to 80% of the quality search traffic on the web, this drastically affects how much targeted traffic you receive from your articles.

This is truly worrisome because...

Years ago, I discovered a very effective marketing tactic which surprised me at first. Traffic coming from an article directory like Ezinearticles converted into a sale more often than traffic just coming directly from Google.

This is the whole "Pre-sell" process which truly works. You use your article to pre-sell a particular service or product. The objective of the article is to put the reader and potential customer in the right mind-set so that they are more likely to buy once they reach your site.

Actually, many times there is nothing subtle about these articles such as:

How To Find The Best Laptop Deals
How To Use Dell Laptop Coupons To Get The Best Price
Five Things To Check Before Buying A Gaming Laptop

Articles like these put the reader in the right frame of mind to buy your product. And these articles have always been a very effective part of my marketing funnels which starts with searchers using the search engines, usually Google, then flowing through these articles on the major directories and finally landing up on my website where they are further tempted or encouraged to buy a product, which in my case are strictly affiliate products.

This encouragement usually involves a large discount or coupon on the product being promoted. Everyone wins... especially the customer who gets a special deal.

Besides the discounts or deals, I believe another reason these marketing funnels are so effective has to do with a psychological factor... people want to feel smart, doing a search in Google, finding an informative and entertaining article on the product in question and then using that article to find a spectacular deal will make people feel smart and satisfied.

We are all still only hunters and gatherers. Not that far from the plains of Africa.

Well, let's not get too carried away, but these articles and article marketing have worked for me, but now Google has thrown a monkey wrench into the whole process. In the recent updates, many of these articles are no longer listed high for lucrative keywords. No rankings, no traffic, no readers, no customers, no sales.

But this is just one aspect of article marketing, I also use my articles to build my top rankings in Google for my own sites. In this case, traffic comes directly from Google.

Writing articles and placing your backlinks in the resource still works but much, much, much less than it did in the past. Especially now that Google is lowering the rank of these article listings in their SERPS, your site rankings which depend upon these article backlinks are also lowered. In addition, many sites use the "no-follow" tags so your backlinks lose their effectiveness.

This is a double whammy which makes article marketing less effective.

However, that's not what is really killing article marketing. In the past, most webmasters picked up your articles and placed them on their sites - this is happening less and less. With the whole issue of duplicate content raised by Google in recent updates... webmasters are deciding to ONLY place unique content on their sites, just to be on the safe side of any more updates from the big G.

End result - less exposure for your articles.

Plus, more and more people simply scrap or steal your article and place their own links in the resource box. Others will simply take your article and "spin it" using a software program which will spit out a different version of your article, usually in a jumbled nonsense form.

This has happened to me on countless occasions and that's just the ones which I have found. Most times these rip-off artists change the title of your article so that it is hard to track.

Lastly, competition among article writers has greatly increased. We now have millions of writers competing for the same attention and the same keywords, all this competition makes article marketing less effective and much more harder to do.

So is article marketing truly dead?

Yes and No.

Despite certain recent lowerings in the latest Google update, your articles in the major authority article directories like Ezinearticles and Buzzle, will always rank well in the search engines - especially with it comes to long-tail phrases and less competitive keywords.

However, the old forms of article marketing have really become less effective as more and more competition comes online. Plus, Google's recent updates have lowered the rankings of many article directories which have affected your articles. In addition, article scraping and spinning have made articles in general less effective on the web.

Perhaps, the only saving grace, you can write unique articles which you submit to sites. Instead of placing your article on countless sites where your backlinks are usually corrupted anyway, you place your unique article on a related site which is highly ranked for the keywords you're targeting.

Keep in mind, many article directories will also take unique articles and they will only appear on their site, Buzzle comes readily to mind. Other directories, like Article Alley, gives you a choice to distribute your article or keep it unique, so too does Promotion World.

Going forward, if Google keeps penalizing sites for duplicate content or for not having unique content... then article marketing as we once knew it, is indeed dead. However, it may still play a leading role in creating unique content for keyword related sites who accept your article, along with those all important backlinks.

If you think of it as a high powered sniper rifle, instead of a shotgun, article marketing can still hit its target.

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The author is a full time online affiliate marketer who operates numerous niche sites. Titus Hoskins Copyright 2011 - Do Not Copy!

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