“Is article marketing still a good link and traffic acquisition technique?”

*This is an excerpt from two of the top authorities in Search Engine Optimization, Leslie Rohde and Dan Thies.

So Dan and Leslie basically break it down into the following regarding article marketing’s effectiveness for 2013 onward:  The simple answer is “no”, but let’s explain and defend that, okay?

There are a couple different things we want to get from links. Everybody talks about ranking, and links certainly help (a lot!) with that, but when done right, links also provide targeted traffic.

Maybe an article directory could provide some traffic, but how well targeted would it be? Not very. And, Google has never liked article directories and has recently gotten very good at not only discounting the links, but reducing the ranking of these directories as well.

The links that Google really wants are the “natural” links created by people because they value and share your content. That is very specifically NOT what article directories are about. Instead, what they provide is a place for webmasters to pick up and republish content to “fatten up” their own sites.

This unavoidably creates duplicate content and builds links from sites that have zero to minimal interest in your site – or maybe even your topic!

So if the links aren’t counted by Google and the traffic is (at best) of questionable value, is “article marketing” really even marketing at all?

Well, never say never, but we stopped teaching it years ago and have no plans to start teaching it again. There are far far better ways to use
your content that we’ll discuss in future posts.

Until then …

Keep creating quality content your readers love and engage with, not for the search engines!