The latest Google Panda change did a real number on some article sites.   Panda is the name that Google gave to its latest major algorithm change. This change was specifically targeting content scrapping sites that automatically added content to its site by “pulling in” content from other sites, or auto generating content by putting bits and pieces of content together, or sites that have very weak content.

 Ezinearticle.com which is one of the more diligent sites when it comes to avoiding duplicate content and assuring quality content reported that their site has experienced up to 30% drop in organic traffic attributable to Panda. Virtually all of the other article sites that I am aware of have similar or worse traffic and rankings drops. 

Clearly things have changed and getting quality links via article writing will be more difficult. Does this mean that article marketing should be abandoned as an SEO technique? No, but it does mean that this strategy should be revisited.   Let’s review some past article marketing practices that were used:

Writing articles with no point or purpose or valuable content.   The content of the article (as well as grammar) was ridiculous. Anybody who read the article would immediately see it was worthless crap and leave.

Using software to generate content (or regenerate content from an original article) These articles have no original thought or content, but just at best “rephrasing” an article or at worst coming up with gibberish.

Submitting the same (or very similar) article to many different article sites in hope that search engines would count the links from thousands of sites.

Writing articles that link to sites that are not related to the topic of the article.

All of the above practices created zero value to the reader, so Google was certainly justified in cracking down on this.  

 It does appear that articles that are original, informative, content rich and actually useful are still ranking. One of my clients wrote an article on silver migration in membrane switches; this is ranked number three for that search term. So writing articles is still a good technique as long as it is original and informative.  Publishing them on article sites can still be helpful, publishing them on your own site might be better.