Article marketing has been an important backlinking strategy since the beginning of SEO. But Google’s Panda update penalized article directories because many of them continually published low quality, regurgitated content that brought down the quality of Google’s search results.

Many online marketers hire the cheapest writers they can find to write content or use article spinning software to create several variations of the same article and then submit them to different article directories. Such practices further contributed to the downward spiral of article marketing’s quality. An increasing number of Google users complained about the low quality content that often appeared in the search results and Google had to do something about it. That’s how Google’s Panda update was born.

Is Article Marketing Still Worthwhile?

After Google Panda, article marketing definitely isn’t effective as it used to be, but it’s still alive. You can benefit from article marketing if you submit original, quality content to the top article directories and then have links point to those articles from various sources, including your website. In order to be considered high quality, your articles must be well-researched and well-written.

What you shouldn’t do, which is the type of practice that Google was trying to do away with by introducing the Panda update, is hire someone in India to write hundreds of sloppy $3 articles for you, submit them to various article directories, and then expect to see improved rankings and traffic. The article directories that were the worst hit by the Google Panda update are scrambling to improve the quality of their articles by increasing the required word count of article submissions and making their editorial requirements stricter. So, if you want to engage in article marketing and see worthwhile results, you can no longer submit low quality writing and expect it to improve your website’s search engine rankings. You have to write excellent content and then promote it to some extent if you want to see positive results.

How to Get the Most out of Article Marketing

After you write great content and submit it to the top article directories, you have to build links to the content. You can do this by linking to the content on your own website, submitting the content to social media websites like Twitter and Facebook, and submitting the content to social bookmarking sites. It’s also important to note that many article directories have their own communities. By getting involved in their respective communities, you can drive more traffic to your articles and ultimately, your website.

If you only rely on the search engine traffic that your articles receive, then you will be sorely disappointed in the results of article marketing. You may even find that you get ZERO traffic from your articles in article directories, unless you actually do the work of promoting them.

You also have to keep in mind that the links you get from article directories and web 2.0 sites don’t transfer trust, authority, and pagerank to your site like they used to. The pages themselves accumulate trust, authority, and pagerank, however, and thus help boost traffic to your site by pointing people to it. Just remember not to put all of your eggs in one basket. Article marketing is effective, but you should rely on a diversity of backlinking strategies if you want your website to succeed in the long run.

Consider it like this. Imagine authority is money, and a particular page has $10 in “authority” to spend. It links out to 10 pages, so each of those pages gets $1 ($10 divided by 10). If it links to 20 pages, each gets 50 cents ($10 divided by 20). If it links to 5 pages, each page gets $2 (you get the math by now).

With the update a page with $10 in authority an 10 links will give each links a $1 in authority, regardless if the links were blocked.

The way the links are blocked from passing authority is with the rel=nofollow tag, which goes:

<a rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank” href=”http://searchengineland.com/microsofts-bing-vs-google-head-to-head-search-results-20006″>Anchor Text</a>

The nofollow attribute tells Google not to crawl the link, which in turn prevents pagerank flow to the linked page. The nofollow is the invention of Matt Cutts, head Google’s Antispam team. The tag was a measure against blog spam, but since been recommended by Google to be applied to paid links.

Read more on the topic.

Yahoo Maps Now With Better Search Integration & New Features

• Improved Local Search integration that utilizes the Search/Direct Display Index
• More user-friendly Driving Directions – a more user-friendly left rail that’s both wider and more legible (larger text), for easier reading of driving directions
• A redesigned Print Page
• The ability to minimize multiple driving direction instructions to save vertical space
• The ability to display inline turn-by-turn images for each driving direction segment
• An Interactive Print Page Map
• Users can now select from a variety map views (full route, full route + finish, full route + start + finish)
• Drag/Pan/zoom functionality for print page maps
• Interactivity between Points of Interest (POIs) and Map view; minimized POIs are removed from the map view
• Improved POIs – with ability to minimize/collapse multiple POIS to maximize viewing area

Google To Develop A Venture-Capital Unit

Google to Extend Reach With Venture-Capital Arm from the Wall Street Journal reports Google is in the early stages of putting together a corporate venture-capital unit, within Google.

Strategic and long term move by Google. Once good companies pop up Google can lunch on them.

comScore: No Clients are Leaving Us for Google

comScore CEO Magid Abraham said, “We really haven’t seen an impact so far on our business, we haven’t heard any client who’s said well use [the Google product] instead of comScore,” according to Marketwatch.

Comscore is the internet measurement company. With recent release of Google Ad Planner many chatted Comscore and Nielsen are going to lose some customers. Appears they’re doing fine.

Microsoft Releases BrowseRank to Topple Google PageRank

In obsessive, passionate, multi-billion dollar battle against Google, Microsoft made another move. BrowseRank is a new algorithm that looks at user behavior as a cue to the quality of web pages.

Read rest of the post

YouTube Sued By Italian Broadcaster Mediaset

In a factually similar claim to the current Viacom litigation, Google/YouTube was sued by Italian media company and broadcaster Mediaset, which is owned by Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The company is seeking a minimum of EUR 500 million for copyright violations and hypothetical, lost ad revenue.

Another company looking to cash in on Google. When you’re that big it’s tempting to milk the cow a little. Though Google spins a kids-like brand, it’s rather a bull than a cow… Then italiano mafiosi can always send “Tony” and “Vincent” to shake up Sergei and Larry:

- “Where’s the money bit**!” – said Tony with think Brookline accent. “…I ain’ t no one b**ch” answered Sergey.

Vince, a chubby fellah with “don’t f*** with me” face rushed on to Sergey, grabbing a nearby lamp from the coffee table. The lamp went across Sergei’s forehead, leaving a think stitch. Sergey collapsed, holding his head, lying in a fresh pool of blood…. Vince came closer, punched Sergei into stomach, screaming: “you gonna get that 500 mil, you got 24 hours or you’re dead! You got that kid? 24 f**ing hours…

I miss Sopranos.

Report: Newspapers, Yellow Pages Battle For Local Online Advertising Revenues

A new report from analyst firm Borrell Associates contains fairly dire revenue projections for both local newspapers and print yellow pages ($5 billion in projected print revenue losses in five years). The newspaper angle is picked up today by the Wall Street Journal and PaidContent, which both lay out some of the numbers.

Google Beta Testing Showing Related Phrases Near Documents in Search Results

Hey folks, I wanted to let you know that new toolbar PageRank values should become visible over the next few days. I’m expecting that also in the next few days that we’ll be expiring some older penalties on websites. – Matt Cutts Blog

Google is updating PageRank again. Old penalties refer to the war Google opened back in November 2007 agaist paid links lowering pagerank for sites that bought or sold links.

Discussions About Page Rank Update

Digital Point:

Matt Cutts: Google Toolbar PR Update Coming!

Google’s Q1 (2008) Page Rank Discussion Thread

SEO Chat:

Page Rank Update Started

Page Rank Update

Last PageRank Update was in April 2008.

This is a continuation of our series on conversion optimization. In this article we talk about search engine marketing.

Term Search Engine Marketing or SEM, covers two disciplines SEO and PPC. Both are ways to market your site on search engines.

Some definitions if you’re not already familiar.

• SEO
• PPC

The reason why we talk SEM first is because there has to be a healthy flow of traffic to your website. What good is a site no one visits? Search engines are ideal. They deliver visitors interested in your products / services, because visitors:

1. Got to a search engine. 2. Typed in keywords. 3. Clicked on your site.

So your company and your offer are very relevant to them, as opposed to banners, pop-up, pop-unders and other “push” online marketing methods.

Selecting between PPC and SEO is not hard. If you’re willing to pay for the traffic all the time and have resources for it, PPC is for you. If you want traffic, but for a onetime fee, SEO is the solution.

Search Engine Marketing is a vast industry. We won’t spend much time discussing it, because other have done it 1000 times before, and done it better. We’ll rather point to best resources.

You have 2 choices:

- Learn the stuff yourself.

- Hire a search marketing company.

You can also go for branding with social media and direct traffic building.

Learning Search Engine Marketing – PPC

It’s very easy to learn Pay Per Click basics. You select the keywords, put up a bid and search engines do the rest. Of course there are more advanced strategies, such as selection of longer keywords, headline testing, ad copy testing and 100.000+ keyword list strategies. Those are advances you will learn once you get into it. Search engines offer very intuitive platforms. All you need is to grasp the basics. As you go along, you’ll read more material, test more strategies and eventually become a pro at it.

3 Major PPC platforms:

• Google Adwords
• Yahoo Search Marketing
• Microsoft Adcenter

PPC tutorials from search engines:

• Google Adwords Learning Center
• Google Adwords Tips and Tricks

Google offers both training and PPC strategies in its learning center. Best of all resources.

• Yahoo Search Marketing Help
• Microsoft doesn’t offer much help, but its similar to other 2 networks.

This all you need to know about PPC to launch a campaign and drive traffic to your website

Here’s 2 more advanced techniques:

The Secret Of Large Term Lists (It’s All In The Bidding)

Computing Optimal Pay-Per-Click Bids In 19 Easy Steps

Learning Search Engine Marketing – SEO

SEO is too big to cover in one, two or 20 sittings. In fact, some pros made businesses by teaching search engine optimization. We’ll give you the resources, you do the rest.

SEO Articles to Read.

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine – Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Google founders released a paper back in Stanford University, before Google wasn’t known beyond its walls.

• Beginner’s Guide to SEO – great article to get you started in search engine optimization
• Search Engine Ranking Factors – SEO professionals get down and share their opinions on what matters to search engines.
• Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone – Webmaster World member shares his experience on how to build a successful website.
• Rewriting the Beginner’s Guide – update to beginners guide on SEO.
• Sculpting Your PageRank For Maximum SEO Impact – use of the “nofollow” tag to sculp Google PageRank
• SEO Articles by Aaron Wall – number of articles by a search engine marketing expert Aaron Wall.

How Google crawls my site – How? Google answers.

How do you choose your URL file names? – want to change URL names but afraid of loosing rankings? Here’s a solution.

Link Building

• Link Value Factors – experts get together and share their insight on link building.
• Link Building Secrets Revealed by Top Linking Experts – link build tricks revealed by SEO experts in PDF file
• Advanced Link Building Strategies – …have attempted to list here many of the link building tactics used by the SEO community
• Experts – Link Love – blog on link building
• How Google, Yahoo & Ask.com Treat the No Follow Link Attribute – a “nofollow” is an attribute in a link which tells search engines not to follow the link. Some search engines adhere, some don’t. Article explains which ones exactly.

Paid SEO Resources

SEO Book – a site from a search engine marketing professional who wrote the best book on SEO – Aaron Wall. The book is no longer on sale and you need to become a member at $50 per month to get book content and much more.

SEO Moz – another website that offers vast SEO resources and training on all search engine marketing. Membership is $40 per month.

SEM Blogs

List of best blogs on search engine optimization.

SEOmoz

SEO Book

Weip.net

SEO by the SEA

Wolf-Howl

StuntDubl

Matt Cutts Blog

SearchRank Blog

Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Forums

Whenever you got a question about search engine optimization, best place to ask is on forums. Here’s a list of the best SEO forums.

• WebmasterWorld Forums
• Digital Point Forums
• Search Engine Watch Forums
• Cre8asite Forums

Search Marketing News

Search engine marketing is a dynamic business. A major shift in algorithms can cost you rankings, visitors and money. Keep an eye on the news. If anything big happens, everybody will talk.

Search Engine Watch – the oldest one, was founded by a search expert Danny Sullivan.

Search Engine Land – latest news in the industry. Run by Danny Sullivan

Search Engine RoundTable – coverage of SEO forums.

Hiring a Search Engine Marketing Company

There are many great companies that can take care of both PPC and SEO. You can try us, or use a search engine to find one.

Google updated it’s pagerank yet again. This time it seems big, as all SEOs are picking it up:

April 2008 Pagerank update topics

Webmaster World Forums

Digital Point Forums

SEO Chat Forums

Barry of Search Engine Roundtable also reported on his blog and on search engine land.

Celebration!

As mentioned before, Google awarded us +1 pagerank. Our new Pagerank is 6!

Last update rolled out at the end of the November, primarily targeting link selling websites.

Major SEO publications have not picked up on it yet and will probably stay quiet until Monday, however here are some forum recaps and comments that people experienced. If it isn’t a major page rank update, at the very least it is a select PR adjustment.

Webmaster Word Forums:

– "My site went from a PR4 to a PR0 overnight. It wasn’t just the index but every page on the site."

Digital point Forums:

– "My graybar site went to 3, so it’s definitely happening."

– "My Webdirectory MainPage doesn’t change. But my submit.php went 0 to 3"

- "My forum jump from N/A to PR2 today. However, nothing happen with the main site yet or maybe I get the same PR’

– "My site when from PR2 to PR3."

Another Thread on Digital Point:

- "Yey yey.. mine is now at pr4 from pr3"

– "My site jumped from PR2 -> PR3 .. actually smartpagerank’s toolbar shows me 3 .. but digpagerank shows me 2 still .. so i don’t kno =P"

Continued with more then 20 page rank update reports

Apart from speculated pagerank update, Google seems to be tweaking its SERPs.

Digital Point Thread:
- "I saw a huge jump from position 9 on first page to 2 for my top two keywords and then dropped again (still on first page though). Others seem to be jumping all over."

- "Yeah, a couple of my sites are starting to have their PR jump around. An update may be coming."

– "I’m seeing serps going all over the place not seeing any change in pr though."

Though this is not confirmed, at least the pagerank issue has critical mass in place as of 11.01.2008

It may a little while for the official statements to break out, but the digital point forums have been swarmed with page rank update threads. This PR update will most likely be a regular roll out, while the previous one was targeted at a very specific group.

Does Page Rank matter?

It seems that PR does not have as much weight as it used to. First off, because Matt stated it usually represents past data, secondly it doesn’t affect the actual search placement. Page Rank in itself is an invention by which Google calculates the incoming links(site value), but due to a number of factors, public toolbar version of pagerank has lost some of its weight.

A number of websites selling links used and continue to use PR as an indicator of the website ranking power, so page rank has weighty marketing value.

Apart from link market, Page rank stays an important indicator to many people, as some of the digitalpoint forum participants put it:

- "customers have Google Toolbar installed, and when they don’t see the green bar – they think the site is new and not trustworthy…"

- "You just hit the nail right on the head with a very big mallet. Twice.
It’s a known fact if users have the Google Toolbar installed and see the exact same product on two sites, exact same price including delivery, the consumer will always buy the product from the site with PageRank. It’s a fact."

Regardless, Page rank always manages to send storms through SEO community. Whether PR has weighty value or not, stays a fierce debate of viewpoints, but a tweak from 5 to 6 definitely adds that classy touch, especially in the eyes of savvy customers.

We will definitely update on the upcoming PR development that will unfold over the weekends.

On the official Google blog Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye have posted another update as to why it is a bad practice to buy and sell links that affect the rankings.

“If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank violates our webmaster guidelines. Such links can hurt relevance…”

Matt Cutts went further and on his own blog, and gave an extreme example of a paid review on a very sensitive subject which was poorly executed and could cost people their health.

Google so far made it very clear that they do not like paid links that affect search position and are taking steps to minimize the impact. Googlers are not alone on this issue, as Yahoo, Ask and Microsoft seem to share the same ground.

What do webmasters think about this?

Webmasters and SEOs seem to understand the steps carried out by Google, which are ultimately aimed at preserving the quality of search results, however there are a number of SEOs who are not too hype about it.

Some discussions.
Offical Word From Google About Paid Links – Cre8asiteforums.

Matt Cutts & Maile Ohye on buying / selling links – Search Enigne Watch

New Post from Matt Cutts on on Paid Links/Blog Posts... – Digital point

More on Search Engine roundtable.

“People have mouths to feed. Right or wrong, some people will do whatever it takes to pay their bills. That’s just a fact of life. Expecting people to follow rules is unrealistic.” – Shpinn

“I think it’s excellent that you are now doing your utmost to educate webmasters about the paid links issue in more public arenas than
personal blogs and search marketing conferences.” – Google Groups.

Google team made it crystal clear, they do not want paid links and are taking the steps to crack down on the practice. There two very different views on this, which can’t seem to come to an agreement.

Expect more algo updates and devaluations in a campaign to maintain the highest quality of search results at it always been since the birth of Google.

Ever since Update Jagger, which prepared the way for Google’s new Big Daddy infrastructure, the changes and shifts to the SERPs come so frequently that we haven’t called an Update in over a year. Instead, we’ve been trying to watch the SERP changes in an ongoing, monthly thread that shifts with the irregular roll, pitch and yaw of the good ship Google.

The history of PR updates:

* April 27, 2007
* January 25, 2007
* January 10, 2007
* September 28, 2006
* July 13, 2006
* April 4, 2006
* February 18, 2006
* December 19, 2005
* October 19, 2005
* July 14, 2005

Over the last two years Google has updated PageRank 10 times, on average once every three months.

PageRank is calculated using:

1. The number of pages linking to the page.
2. The PageRank of the pages linking to the page.
3. The number of links going out from the pages that are linking to the page.

We felt this ourselves. We were ranking #2 for SEO and then poof we could not be found. We looked and looked and wondered if we had done something wrong but weirdly enough the all the other listings were fine. Then a week later we were back in 3rd position on page 1. A hunch is that at any given moment there are millions of calculations and computations taking place at various data centers. Once the calculations are in the listings are re set and credibility restored.

There is a similar affect noted in a post over at Search Engine Land “The larger lesson to be learned from this is Google, Yahoo, Ask, and even Live are doing their job, as they should, analyzing links, discovering the good, the bad, the ugly. Some do it a little better, some a little worse. Some are more susceptible to link spam, some catch it quickly. If your site is on a solid foundation of inbound links, stay the course, continue pursuing high value inbound links, and don’t do anything crazy in a knee jerk response to an unworthy competitor.”

Usually 3-4 weeks after the Google backlink counts change is the time when Google updates their PageRanks and SERPS based on whatever new algorithms they have come up with, and if you build your inbound links the good old fashion way your rank will build with a consistent strong footing.

Jennifer Laycock, from Search Engine Guide weighed in on the issue with some solid points as well. “I’ve seen sites suffer temporary drops in rankings with no corresponding drop in sales. On the other hand, I’ve seen sites experience a drop in sales without any change to their search rankings. Why? Because the rankings and sales, while related, are not directly tied to each other”

She offers three tips concerning page ranking.
1.) Diversify your traffic sources
2.) Focus more on sales and conversions than rankings
3.) Don’t freak out (or celebrate) the moment that your rank changes

I have read threads confirming the update at Search Engine Roundtable Forums, Search Engine Watch Forums, WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

I suggest you read read Danny Sullivan PageRank Guide.

TBPR Export: Toolbar PageRank Export – export of Real PR to the Toolbar PR 11 unit scale (no longer called a PR update as Real PR is updated continously and the Toolbar PR change is just an export of that updated value).

TBPR Export Estimation Apr 18

GDPR Export: Google Directory Export – export of Real PR to the Google Directory 8 unit scale (no longer called a PR update as Real PR is updated continuously and the Google directory PR change is an export of that updated value).

Matt Cutts wrote: “The quarterly-ish PageRank export is underway. As always, don’t expect traffic or rankings to dramatically change, because these PageRank values are already incorporated into our scoring. The same quarterly-ish data push that updates PageRank in the toolbar also updates the data for related:, link: and info: (remember that operator?). You can read more about PageRank from this previous post if you swing that way. Also remember that the link: operator only shows a subsample of the links to a page that we know of. I’ve mentioned before that some data centers (I believe 64.233.183.xx and 72.14.203.xx) continue to show PageRank values from a slightly older infrastructure. Not a big deal, but I wanted to mention it for the hard-core data center watchers so that they don’t get confused.

There were some situations where site: would show supplemental results ahead of regular results. I believe we’ve changed that so that regular results will usually show ahead of supplemental results for site: queries.”

*********************

Google describes Page Rank (PR) like this: http://www.google.com/technology/

‘The heart of our software is PageRank, a system for ranking web pages’ that provides’ the basis for all of our web search tools.’

So they’re writing that it’s an essential part of the way they determine which sites rank in what order on their search results. They continue by writing:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Keep an eye on your sites and hope that all that hard work in the last 3 months shows up. Which ones of you can now say you gained a little extension to your green bar?

DataCenter

64.233.161.99

64.233.161.104

66.102.7.99

66.102.7.104

216.239.59.99

216.239.59.104

216.239.37.104

216.239.39.99

216.239.39.104

66.102.11.99

66.102.11.104

216.239.57.99

216.239.57.104

66.102.9.99

66.102.9.104

216.239.53.99

216.239.53.104

I did notice a change in the Google Toolbar PR ranking for each of my sites over the past week or so. I am very pleased! I seems to be a permanent change and yes I do spend too much time fixating on the little green bar. Keep in mind its not an accurate indicator of your true Google PageRank, only a very broad approximation.

Matt Cutts said..

Okay, it’s been a while since my last infrastructure status report, so I’ll briefly cover the things that I know are going on.

The quarterly-ish PageRank export is underway. As always, don’t expect traffic or rankings to dramatically change, because these PageRank values are already incorporated into our scoring.