Bulletin - Google’s New Algorithm Change Likely to Affect Article Marketing

A change in Google’s algorithms at the end of February has been rolled out in the U.S. and has reportedly had a negative affect on the results of the search engine rankings for many popular article websites including Ezinearticles and Articlesbase.

This change seems likely to be rolled out in the U.K at an unspecified time in the near future and therefore could have some negative impacts on the benefits that some websites have enjoyed from using online article marketing.

Popular uses of articles for SEO purposes include positing articles on article websites to try and obtain high quality incoming links with the hope of increasing PageRank™ and rankings in the natural / organic search engine results.

On the 24th February Google’s official blog announced “a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries”. Google said the change was designed “to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.

At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on”.

The algorithm change appears to be likely to negatively affect ‘content farms’. These could be described as either:

1. Websites which ‘scrape’ or take existing (and therefore unoriginal) content from other websites to try and achieve rankings for long tail key phrases and get extra clicks on AdSense adverts.
2. Websites which collect content in bulk of varying quality in order to achieve keyword rankings and get clicks on the AdSense adverts featured on the website.

One of the most high profile websites affected negatively by the algorithm change was Ezinearticles.com. On the Ezinearticles official blog the CEO Chris Knight reported that “Traffic was down 11.5% on Thursday and over 35% on Friday. In our life-to-date, this is the single most significant reduction in market trust we’ve experienced from Google”. A series of actions that EzineArticles are taking in response includes:

• Rejecting 10+% of article submissions that are not ‘unique enough’.
• Not accepting article submissions via Wordpress blogs directly.
• Possibly raising the minimum article word count to 400.
• Raising the article rejection rate from 40% to 60%.
• Possibly rejecting articles which aren’t exclusively used on Ezinearticles.

The Implications For You and Your Website

This depends on the type, extent and quality of your online article marketing, and your use of content generally.

mkLINK’s Recommendations

If using article websites make sure that your submissions are at least 400 words long, contain content that is original, is interesting, of high quality, and likely to be of high value to human readers. Keep producing good quality and high value content on a regular in all aspects of your websites, blogs, and general online marketing.

We can help you with this - go to http://www.mklink.com/getstarted now!