Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
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 nonsense 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 white hat SEO. By early 2010 article directories were full of garbage content that made no sense to users. The automatic spinners produced horrendous spins using synonyms that made no sense at all.
As the article directories began to fill up with poor content that actually ranked well on Google and other search engines; something had to happen. Any expert in SEO 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, EMDs (exact match domains) were also dominating the search results along with web2.0’s, which were 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. The situation worsened significantly.
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 as 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 increased the minimum word count 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. In the end, 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.
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Comments
Calix Olvera
I remember those times! Article marketing was indeed a big deal back in the day, but things really did change after Google’s updates. It’s a shame because it worked so well for a while.
SaraK
Great post, David. I was using those article submitter tools too, but I agree, they became less effective as Google started cracking down on low-quality content. We definitely have to adapt to new SEO strategies now.
ElianaP
I completely agree with what you’ve said in this article. It reminds me of the time when I relied heavily on article marketing to promote my site. Keep up the good work, David!
LuisR
I find it hard to believe that article marketing worked so well for so long. Do you have any data or case studies from that time that show the effectiveness of article directories?
NinaG
David, could you clarify what you mean by “spun articles”? Is that something still used in today’s SEO strategies or has it been completely phased out?
BrandonK
I think this post is missing a deeper analysis of why the article directories failed so quickly after dominating the SEO landscape. There’s more to the story than just Google’s algorithm updates.
AnaC
It’s funny that you mention this. I remember using some of these tools myself back in 2010. How have you been, David? Would love to catch up over coffee sometime.
OscarL
I had a similar experience with using article marketing tools. For a while, they brought in great results, but after Google’s updates, the effectiveness just vanished overnight. It was frustrating, but a good learning experience.
LuciaV
Speaking of tools, I recently came across another tool that helps generate high-quality SEO content, but without spinning articles. It’s called Surfer SEO, and it focuses on content optimization for today’s standards. You should check it out!
HaroldJ
This post was a real eye-opener for me. I had no idea article marketing played such a pivotal role in early SEO. I’ve learned a lot and will definitely be looking into some of the alternatives you mentioned.
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Sorry if this is a basic question, but I’m confused about the timeline here — it sounds like spinning articles worked fine for about a year before Google caught on, is that really how long these things typically last before they stop working? I only started six months ago and everything I try feels like it’s already too late to matter.
I used automatic submitters during exactly the window this post describes, and I’ll say the plain version of what happened: it worked because the directories had essentially no quality control, and it stopped working the moment that changed, not because Google got smarter overnight. What’s easy to forget now is how much of that traffic was genuinely useful to build a small business on for a year or two, however unglamorous the method looks in hindsight. I got out of that game long before I got out of the industry entirely, and I don’t think either decision was wrong. Tools like that always have a shelf life. The mistake is building a whole strategy as if they don’t.
A year and a half of steady traffic off a strategy you could run in stolen minutes at night. That’s the part worth noting, not the collapse.
Samir’s timeline matches what I remember from running a health blog through that period. I was submitting three spun variations a week starting in late 2009, saw referral traffic pick up within about a month, and it held steady for roughly a year and a half. Around March 2011 two of my top directories switched to manual review and my approval rate dropped from nearly everything to maybe one in five submissions. That’s when I knew the strategy was done, not when I read about Google’s update.
What strikes me about Kelsey’s account is the approval rate dropping to one in five almost overnight. That’s not really a quality filter kicking in gradually, that’s a switch flipping. Worth remembering before trusting anything built entirely on someone else’s unmoderated system.
A month to see referral traffic is a different world from where I am. Feed store customers don’t find me through an article directory, they find me because I’m the only one in three counties. This whole strategy assumes an audience big enough that a directory listing actually gets seen by strangers.
Fine, but ‘find me because I’m the only one in three counties’ is its own kind of moat most businesses don’t get to have. Not every lesson here transfers.
I can’t speak to the directories specifically, but from the field development side of a different industry, this pattern is familiar: any channel with no gatekeeper gets flooded until someone adds a gatekeeper, and everyone who built around the gap has to rebuild. I’d only add that the post frames it as Google’s decision, when the directories choosing to auto-approve everything for years is really where the actual failure started.
The post attributes the collapse entirely to Google ‘noticing’ spun content, but the more interesting mechanism is upstream of that: auto-approve directories removed the one quality filter that used to exist, which is what let the spinning software scale in the first place. Google didn’t need a new algorithm to fix this, it just needed the directories to stop being a firehose of unmoderated pages. The penalty was really a correction for a structural hole, not a sudden crackdown.