In 2009, there was an article marketing frenzy. The whole world of Internet Marketers were doing it, and for a good reason too. The directories were “over valued” and ranked all over the place for no good reason. Just because of the way article directories were and are structured.

Most article directories follow the same internal linking structure. The structure that pushes hordes of link juice through to single article pages giving them instant authority. Coupled with their high Page Rank domains, article directories dominated the search engines.

It was difficult to Google a keyword without finding an article directory on the first or second page. At the time everyone was using article directories to drive traffic directly to their websites. The backlinks they built were just a bonus.

As more and more marketers caught onto the fact that they ranked so well and provided great backlinks, the spamming begun. SEO’s had been abusing article directories for years before, but in 2009 it got a lot worse.

During the frenzy, I started to use a tool called automatic article submitter. It was one of the first fully automated article submitters that actually worked. It was a dumb piece of software that would submit unique variations of spun articles to hundreds of article directories.

As more and more marketers, webmasters and SEO’s started using the software and others alike; directories became less effective. It was as if Google had pulled down the lever controlling article directory effectiveness.

The problem was in the spinning. Software tools like AAS were so easy to use, that it seemed like a waste of time to manually write and submit articles. You could manually write and submit an article to a directory to gain a single backlink.

Or could write, spin and automatically submit thousands of “unique” article variations and gain hundreds or thousands of backlinks. People chose the easier, faster and more cost effective option. It worked for a while, until people abused the power of automation.

Article Marketing History

When article submission tools first came into existence; people would manually write and spin their articles for submission. They would make sure every spun variation would read well and make complete sense. After all, the directories wouldn’t accept bad articles would they? (hah)

Now because the spun variations actually read well, they worked and Google didn’t mind; so it seemed. So people continued to manually write and spin their promo articles for a while. It didn’t take long for people to get greedy.

They wanted more automation, faster and cheaper results. So they started to steal or “borrow” articles from existing directories. They started to steal live articles, spin them and submit them through their submission tools. For a while it gave the same results as manually written and spun articles.

As many directories back then were 100% auto approve. Which meant they didn’t moderate their article submissions, they just accepted them. People could literally submit a load of bullshit that made no sense and gain fantastic backlinks. As long as the articles were unique, who cared, they did after all get indexed by Google.

Not for long…

Everyone started borrowing articles into existence and spinning them. Back then in late 2009-2010 automatic spinning tools were getting very popular. Desktop software that could instantly spin entire articles and make them ready for submission. It all worked so well for black hat SEO’s.

Everyone was stealing existing articles, instantly spinning and ultimately blasting them to thousands of article directories. People had no reason not to do it.

After all it was getting them the rankings they desired twenty times faster than stupid white hat SEO did. By early 2010 article directories were full of shit. Complete and utter shit that made no sense to users. The automatic spinners produced horrendous spins by using synonyms that made no sense at all.

As the article directories began to fill up with horrific content that actually ranked well on Google and other search engines; something had to happen. Any idiot who’d been in the game longer than two years could predict the coming storm.

Google was obviously going to do something about it. The quality of content in most of the top search results was borderline disgraceful. At the time EMD’s (exact match domains) were also dominating the search results along with web2.0’s which are much like article directories.

However article directories seemed to be the predominant web property that took over the search results. The quality just wasn’t there so as Google does, a swift slap happened. Google penalized all article directories and lowered their rankings throughout the web.

They stopped ranking so well and forced their owners to control the quality of their articles. Article directories like Ezine Articles and Go Articles lost a huge percentage of their traffic overnight. Shit really hit the fan.

Fast forward to the beginning of 2011, article marketing really died down. Directories raised quality control. Most either shut down or started moderating new submissions. Many did neither and ended up being ghost directories. Full of awful content and at the bottom of the search results.

Most of the top directories got rid of their bad articles, raised quality control and upped the minimum number of words per article to around 400. Although many directories cleaned up their act, article marketing hasn’t been the same since.

Sure, you can still spin bad content and mass submit it to directories; but the results aren’t the same. At the end of the day it’s spamming and that’s not what SEO is about. If you want to survive in the long run, you need to think about how you can contribute to the Internet; not ruin it.

So what are the best article marketing strategies?

>>> Click Here For Part Three

• The History Of Article Marketing
• The History Of Article Marketing Part Two (You Are Here)
• Effective Article Marketing Strategies
• Effective Article Marketing Tips