Google rolled out it’s Panda update in the first quarter of 2012 and big players in the article distribution game were hit with penalties. Sites like EzineArticles.com suffered badly. Web marketers who depend on article distribution for promotion are suffering too, as well as the businesses they promote to a degree. Maybe they should have seen this coming, I mean really if you post an article to a service like this and believe that a tidal wave of targeted visitors is coming your way you might get unexpected results.

Articles are useful to promote your blog, or other information you have online, and they certainly have helped build some relevance for keywords is organic search results. So the question still remains, is there a use for article marketing in 2012? The answer is yes, but you need to know what the landscape is your dealing with.

Google does genuinely return usable search results to it’s audience. With everyone online trying to get visitors, there are a lot of tactics to be reverse engineered. Google has the data and as that index builds and technology advances Google will continue to catch ways people manipulate search results.

Black hat SEO guys surf whatever wave is up, by that I mean they use the methods that work, the day they are promoting and don’t really care if you rank well tomorrow. And why should they care, if your ranking goes up, and down then you need them to constantly do these SEO tasks.

White hat guys, like myself, consider the whole picture and realize that there is value for them always if they do good work and produce results. Quality content, that is usable to the visitor will ALWAYS reign supreme to Google. If you are promoting an expansion, or explanation of that same quality content then you still are golden in the eyes of Google.

So where does it all go wrong? The same way it goes bad in Social Media Marketing. People think the internet is full of mindless, drone like consumers…simply roaming from page to page looking for someone to say “hey I sell this – buy it”…”now”. The truth is people are more web savvy now and know how to fact check things, so false or unsupported data and claims float to the top quickly. Social media like Facebook allows users to crowd source their friends and get advice before purchasing, and those same friends or peers can return alternatives as well. Google has the data to show that the vast majority of visitors to a an article site bounce and/or do not promote article socially. If you don’t think so just go to your Facebook account and look through all of your news feed and see if any one of your friends has shared a article from a press release website – I’ll save you some time, you won’t find one but go ahead and see for yourself.

The arguments are varied but some business to business users read these and go the website linked or mentioned in the article. Many professionals will read about events and seminars and go to the linked or mentioned website and sign up. There is still a very viable use for these outside of business to consumer sales, and outside of social media outlets like Facebook. Just as an example most realtors are not friends with other realtors, so there is no reason for them to poll their “friends” to find a conference on green realty right? A press release would be great for this sort of thing.

So much like blog commenting and the ever quest to build backlinks has caused regulation in that arena, so has article marketing. Had SEO guys not exploited the opportunity and started “spamming” the system then regulation would not have come. Google has done these changes to make sure you keep using google to find things. Think of this way if you went to Google an looked up “movies playing this saturday” and saw a link in the results that said “list of movies in your area” and clicked it, only to see a promotion for a fly fishing event three days only in downtown wherever you are…yo would quit using Google to find movie listings at the very least.