Google farmer update

I’m not sure if you heard about the google farmer update but it affected a lot of online marketers even the big guys.

Every google update focuses on their filtering of quality contents because it is their business to present good and accurate search results to users. The recent Google update also known as Farmer Update was no exception and it looks like it made a huge effect. It was designed to filter out low quality contents and spun articles and based on my personal observation from my campaigns, they made a great job at that.

I noticed that, many article directories were hit including ezinearticles, hubpages and others.  I normally test niches and keywords by submitting articles in those directories and I have many ranking keywords from those pages. After the update, my ranking articles from eza was gone in the top 10. There is no much effect in my profits because I only use those directories for testing and backlinks.

Why those article directories?

We all know that many people are sending articles to those directories for backlink puposes only or easy ranking and not to provide quality contents. If you are researching for something and you found an article from an article directory, will you click and read it? Probably not.

The point here is that, if you rely your sales directly from article directories, your sales will be affected if there are incidents like this. The update have no much effect on my businesses because I put my contents on my own websites and using article directories for testing and additional backlinks only.

In my opinion, it is still better to put most of your articles to your own websites so you can control the quality of contents, backlinks and everything you put in it.

Are article directories or article marketing dead? Not really, Im still using them to get backlinks and I know many people do the same. But if you are ranking pages from directories, it will not be as easy as before and now it is harder for articles to get approved from reputable directories.