Way back in the day (…a few months ago), an online marketer could
make hordes of money simply by writing and posting average articles on
article directories.
You heard that right, oodles and oodles of cash were ripe for the
pickings if you could simply do a little keyword research, form simple
sentences and upload very ordinary, very average articles; you didn’t
need a website, you didn’t need to know any SEO, you didn’t need to know
graphic design or HTML, or even how to collect e-mails.
Those were the salad days, my friends. Back in yesteryear, if you
typed enough and uploaded enough, eventually you’d be making good money.
That was the age of the article directory, an era shrouded in mystery,
obscured by the mists of time long gone by.
Article directories are kind of like dinosaurs these days (legends
that swim only in the deepest lakes of Google’s search engine results
pages). The fact is, Google pretty much wiped them out with a few
changes to their mighty algorithm. A few massive meteor impacts to the
online ecosystem and poof – mass extinction.
OK, that’s a little bit of an exaggeration. But, it’s not too far of a
stretch. Many article directories were mangled by Google, and for good
reason. All those average articles that folks were posting – most
weren’t very good, in fact many of them were complete garbage. They
certainly weren’t the best for Google’s most valuable asset – it
precious users, so Big G slapped ‘em silly. Thwack. They’ve been doing
that a lot lately, haven’t they?
Not only were these article directories filled with poor content,
these websites were pretty much AdSense farms for the directory owners.
There was no pride of ownership, and very little shall we say… editorial
grace.
So, here’s the big question we’re posing today, in our modern day
(A.D. Panda) does article directory traffic still work? Can you get
folks to your websites and sell them stuff, make money off of ads, or
gain subscribers, and so on and so forth?
Well, it’s kind of a mixed bag. Here’s the deal: even though the
directories got slapped, some of them quickly made some changes, like
getting rid of ridiculous amounts of AdSense ad blocks and requiring
much higher standards for publishing. A few of the directories have
bounced back a bit and are now getting decent traffic again. Are they
ranking really well? Answer: not really.
Some of the big directories, Ezine Articles, Article Dashboard and a
few others do get some decent traffic. The other smaller directories
(thousands of them) are now cyber fodder, they’re gone, wiped out and
they’re now floating at the bottom of Lochness.
Of course, article directories aren’t the only players here, quasi
article directories (free blogging platforms) sometimes called Web 2.0
sites also allow anyone to post content onto their authority sites. How
are they faring these days? Well, to be honest some of them are doing
quite well in the search engines. Surprise, surprise.
Tumblr seems to be leading the pack at this point (if you check
Google’s SERPs you’ll notice them atop many search queries); Squidoo and
a few others get good traffic and rank well in the search engines as
well – and they are also a great platform for backlinks to your own
websites (but that’s a whole other ball of wax we’re not going to get
into here.)
Web 2.0 sites or public blogging platforms seem to be doing better in
the search engines than article directories right now. OK, so why might
that be?
Well, many of them do a great job of purging their websites of
garbage content. In the days of yore – way back, a few months ago –
tools like SENuke were throwing up badly spun content onto Web 2.0 sites
all day, all night. Rain or shine, the floods just kept coming.
However, these sites have gotten wise and have deleted and still do
delete hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of these spam pages a day.
These measures are in place and getting tougher every day, thus making
unintelligent spin and spam posting pretty much a thing of the past.
Which, of course, is good for the search engines.
If your content is good and you don’t spam, Web 2.0 sites are good
for traffic. Remember though, to really make it work, you’ve got to keep
adding content to your blog pages and continue interacting with your
visitors. Yes, you have to actually work for it. Imagine that.
All right, let’s now turn to the king of the hill in today’s
satellite web property game. It will be of no surprise to those who
regularly do SEO and monitor Google’s SERPs that the current king of the
hill is YouTube. In fact, it’s kind of ridiculous right now.
It’s easier to rank a YouTube video in Google than it is to walk and
chew gum at the same time. It’s easier than selling a glass of water to a
man whose hair is on fire. And smart marketers jumping on this new
Google algo wrinkle … they’re banking hard.
So, let’s re-frame our article directory/Web 2.0 discussion a tad and
throw a wrench into this topic and declare the wave of the future (or
foreseeable future) to be grabbing traffic from YouTube.
Here’s the bottom line: you need to learn how to
work YouTube, like yesterday. YouTube is here to stay and Google’s
darling isn’t going anywhere in the SERPs. If anything, it will get
stronger and stronger in Google’s results pages.
Isn’t it interesting how Google loves to keep web traffic on it’s own properties? Weird, right?
So, learn how to work with PowerPoint, with Camtasia, learn video
editing, and how to optimize YouTube for Google rankings and you are in
business. No need to mess with article directories or Web 2.0 properties
any more.
We might say that YouTube is sort of like the modern day article
directory. If you don’t believe it, simply start doing some random
searches and you’ll find YouTube right at the top. You’ll see the light
and you’ll be on your way to generating some fast cash just like in the
good old days of … a few months ago.
Glen Hooke,
Post from: SiteProNews
Does Article Directory Traffic Still Work? Using ‘Other’ Websites To Generate Traffic and Cash
