Article Submission Sites VS Google Panda

Article submission has become a favorite way for many online marketer and blogger to build links without too much effort. If you are unfamiliar with this practice, article submission (or also called article marketing) involves writing unique articles and then submitting them to the article directories. Your article will be reviewed by their editors and when it is published, your content becomes searchable and that usually includes a link to the author’s website.


Using this tactic, the article sites will not only get free articles but also the ones who will benefit the most. In recent years, some larger companies have also jumped on this, they created sites and loaded them with their own content. Suite101, wikiHow and eHow are some of the better known ones. Although sites like that are a great source of revenue for Google but their contents are usually very poor and some of them are even considered as spam.

Because of this, Google decided to make a change and thus Panda update was created in order to clean up the landscape. Even though Google claimed that their intent was to find more high-quality and original content but it became obvious that the Panda update was made as an effort to disparage content farms and claim back the territory Google once owned. Like it or not, the article directories were the main target of this algorithmic change.

Will article marketing remain effective? It will likely remain a viable method, but now it will contain more barriers to entry and you need to knock them off their perch by showing your superior content.

Article Submissions Traffic After Panda Update

Ezinearticles was one of the article submission sites impacted the hardest by the Panda update. Shortly after the initial Panda update rolled out, Chris Knight (EzineArticles CEO) started to lay down some guidelines for moving forward on the company blog. He has made some significant changes including a reduction in the number of ads per page, no longer accepting article sumissions through a WordPress Plugin, reducing the number of article submission accepted by over 10% (only for articles that are not unique enough), raising the minimum article word count to 400, removing articles that are considered thin and spammy and many more.

As for HubPages (one of the sites that being hit hard also), the change is quite simple and easy to follow. Other than No duplicate content is allowed (this rule is of course applied to all article marketing sites), there must be at least 50 words of content for every featured product, capsules that contain eBay, Amazon, RSS as well as Link capsules cannot be the first full-width item.

The following are some of the winners of the recent update according to some researchers:
1. Youtube.com
2. Yahoo.com
3.  Blogspot.com
4. Wikipedia.org
5. eHow.com

The following are some of the losers of the recent update according to some researchers:
1. About.com
2. Answers.com
3. Ciao.co.uk
4. Reviewcentre.com
5. Brothersoft.com