My goal has always been to create good content and allow the search engines to find that content. And by focusing on good content instead of massive manipulation of links, I believed that the content I created could stand the test of time because I was focusing on the content and not the algorithm.
However, in every valiant effort, if there is an easier way, we humans will take it. And although I eschewed the concept of blatantly manipulating search rankings, I realized that simply by writing content and getting it posted on already-popular web pages online, both criteria for high search rankings would be met. Meaning that content was being created that would stand the test of time in the search engines, and naturally through the process of the posting of the content on popular sites, natural links would occur which would encourage the search engines to award rankings.
And it worked well. I would write articles and post them to article directories online, the article directories had multiple websites that would "syndicate" the articles, meaning they would publish the articles on their own websites, leaving a link in the article that went back to the original article. The search engines rewarded me (and many others who used this exact strategy) with search rankings.
Article Marketing Corrupted by Greed and Software
So what went wrong? Actually, with that exact strategy, nothing. But . . . many people, in an effort to quickly multiply the efforts of those single articles and inbound links, began to find ways to exponentially increase the proliferation of those articles online. The single biggest problematic tactic, in my opinion, was that of developing software programs that would scramble the order of the words, sentences, and paragraphs in an article so that someone could write one article and have many versions of that article created so it would look like that person had written, for example, 100 articles instead of one.
Then software developers created a way to alter individual words in the articles by using synonyms for each word. The result was millions and millions of spammy, illegitimate, and worthless articles floating around on the web masquerading as original articles. And this completely destroyed the ability of the search engines to naturally award the best rankings to the articles with the best content based on links and raw content.
Search engines solve the corruption dilemma
So the search engines took steps to solve this problem. And in doing so, they have practically eliminated all occurrences of these illegitimate articles online. But in so doing, the impact of legitimate, original articles online has also been changed. The only question is, by how much. My personal experience is, that for originally written articles that are submitted to legitimate article directories, there is not much of a negative impact. I base this on my own traffic from my own originally written articles.
However, the truth remains that because of the ease with which someone could have in the past cloned and duplicated the articles and corrupted the original legitimate process of article marketing, in their efforts to block these illegitimate articles from their search results, the search engines have likely impacted the search results of the bulk of all the articles online, including original articles with good content intent. So although I personally have not been affected much by the changes, the fact remains that likely most people have.
You see, it's not easy (it's time consuming, particularly), and it's counter-intuitive, to write a single article, submit it to a single location, and trust the "system" to accurately assign search rankings. The rankings occur slowly over time, are not consistent from article to article (although on average in aggregated scenarios, there is robust consistency), and is hard work. Because of this, article marketing as it used to be taught, just isn't very popular anymore. Not because it doesn't work. But because the way most people were doing it no longer works.
So over the course of the last few years, as a result of the fact that many people who try to do article marketing struggle to get the kinds of results they need in order to run a viable business, I have been developing a much-advanced system that supercharges and exponentially powers article marketing in today's search environment, and that is what I will teach you in the following sequence of posts.
In the course of giving you the history and reasons why article marketing works, I've given you the concept that content plus links plus traffic plus social activity equals search rankings. Now, there are a few ways to make that occur, but only one way is easily duplicatable in scalable scenarios over the long term.