The Panda Spillover: Losing Links through Article Marketing

The Panda update rolled out by Google last February has left in its wake the electronic equivalent to the D-Day invasion of Normandy in World War II.  Confusion and frustration are everywhere and every little glitch or slight shift in Google rankings is being blamed on Panda, whether it really is related or not.

But here’s a twist you might not have considered.  Even if your site wasn’t directly clipped by Panda, you might have experienced a spillover effect of the update.  The result?  A significant loss of links and therefore a noticeable loss of rankings.  The cause?  Hanging all your linking hopes on article directory websites.

READ THIS: Let me stop right here for a moment and tell you that what I’m about to say is sheer speculation on my part.  I have not seen anything published by Google or any other source that would confirm what I’m saying: but nonetheless, it makes sense.

Don’t Put all Your Links in One Basket

Article marketing is a hugely popular method for link building.  So much so, that it has lead to the decline of article marketing as we know it simply because writers abandoned their sensibilities when it came to developing article content that would please people as well as the search engines.

The creation of substandard articles produced in mass to flood cyberspace with junk that has no other purpose but to supposedly generate links is an oxymoron.  Why?  Because they are banking on the article submission sites to support their linking backbone.  Problem is, those links are ultra easy to get and don’t carry much weight to begin with.

Now, here comes the Panda, roaming about to see who he can destroy, and out goes most of the ezine article sites.  <Follow me here…> So, if your site only has links from article sites and the article sites lose their standing in Google and all their traffic goes away, what happens to all the links pointing to your site?  Poof!  Gone.  The misfortune suffered by the article submission sites thanks to Panda has spilled over onto you.

This is much like the recent disasters in Japan.  While we in the U.S. never suffered from earthquakes or tsunamis, we are now – months later – feeling the spillover effects with shortages of Japanese-made autos, electronics and parts just to name a few.

What’s Up with That?

“I did it just like everybody said to. Why is my article marketing campaign backfiring on me?”

Because “everybody” is doing it wrong.

I’ve said this 1,000 times already and I’ll continue to repeat it until I’m blue in the face if I have to:  the purpose of article marketing is NOT to get your work published on article submission sites. That’s merely a means to an end.

The point is to build *quality* links.  That only happens when you produce content that is of such high quality that other websites want to republish your piece.  Only then will you start to build links that stand the test of time.  But that’s not all.  Writing top-quality articles has many other benefits, too like:

• Establishing yourself as an authority.
• Driving targeted leads to your site.
• Building long-lasting links from trusted sites.
• Expanding your reach to new audiences you might not have otherwise been able to reach.
• And more.

Junk articles of pitiful quality simple can’t do all this because nobody (except scraper sites) wants to reprint them.

If you’ve been losing traffic for no apparent reason, take a look at your backlinks.  Are they from trusted authority sites?  Or are the majority of them from article directories?  You could possibly be suffering from Panda spillover.

(c) 2011, Karon Thackston, All Rights Reserved

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