Article Marketing For SEO Purposes Encourages Content Spam

An interesting blog post at the Christopher Knight driven Ezine Articles Blog describes how they have recently changed their “benefits list” removing the key SEO related benefits of article marketing. Instead they are now focusing on promoting the raw traffic pulling power of EzineArticles.com itself, regardless of whether your article is syndicated to other places or not. Simply put, Ezine Articles is getting a ton of traffic and having your articles at the site means you get some solid exposure.

Chris noted:

There are really two types of expert authors that have memberships with EzineArticles.com:

Type 1) True expert who submits to gain exposure, boost credibility, and attract qualified visitors back to their website. They are mildly SEO aware if at all. The greater majority of our 36k+ expert authors are in this category already.

Type 2) Experts or pseudo experts who are experts in SEO who submit garbage to our site including PLR (Private Label Rights) content and other article vomit. They make up the minority of our members.

With today’s move and future educational things we’ll be delivering; we’re hoping to discontinue attracting the second type of member/author.

Yes, I acknowledge that the benefits that got removed from our marketing piece on the benefits of article marketing probably are still benefits; but no, I don’t plan on educating or reinforcing that they are a benefit because of the type of expert author that we think will add more value to the future of our community of experts.

Read the full post.

To me this reinforces the unfortunate circumstance for those working in SEO – and I think this branches out to include the whole Internet Marketing industry – we face a huge credibility issue. The problem is so many punks use reproduced content, stolen content, PLR content, or to borrow a phrase from Chris – “vomit content”, to attempt to generate income online. For whatever reason, be it laziness, lack of talent or because they follow the hype of an information product, people just can’t be bothered to write relevant and interesting ORIGINAL content. It’s the get rich quick mentality manifesting in get rich quick actions – and it hurts legitimate online marketers.

If you really are a genuine marketer providing new, relevant and helpful content to the SEO or Internet marketing industry, you face a huge bias before you even start to promote yourself. People assume you are yet another spammer/get rich quick merchant/template driven adsense whore (pardon my french). It takes a long time to prove yourself, you need stupid amounts of social proof, testimonials, and satisfied evangelists, before you get even close to braking through the negative perceptions that permeate the industry. Sadly many Internet marketers with something good to offer never receive the attention they deserve because their information is drowning in a sea of crap.

Perhaps we should be using our marketing skills in areas where the marketplace doesn’t have such a jaded view, where we are not swimming in “dirty waters”. That way we can expend half the efforts with our fantastic and unique content and ideas and get double the rewards. I’m all for that!