Article writing for SEM; Is chaos at hand?

There has been a ‘new’ trend afoot in the SEM (search engine marketing) world the last while. As with many new ‘approaches’ it seemed like a great idea at first perusal. Just like so many of it’s predecessors, cracks are beginning to show. These cracks also have the potential to grow into website eating fissures that could even bring mighty Google to it’s knees!

Article Submission for SEO, the hottest ticket in town.

To start with, although blatantly redundant in my quest to educate the masses, Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is just that. Optimization. The actual activity or ‘action’ is called Search Engine Marketing or SEM. As such, Article submission strategies are part of SEM, not SEO. Let’s get that sorted straight away. Enough with the alphabet soup, back to business.

For those whom are not enlightened in the whole ‘Articles for Ranking’ theory, I shall summarize. Part of what gets websites higher rankings on the major search engines is back links. Back links are the number of links pointing back to a particular website. Most modern search engine algorithms, give higher ranking based on the number of back links to a particular site out on the web. A supposed 'popularity meter'. The theory goes, that if you write articles, submit them to article repositories with footer text and a link to your site, you will magically see hundreds if not thousands of links back to your site. This in turn would raise your SERPs (search engine result position). As I said, a sound theory on paper.

Let us not forget our past, lest we are doomed to repeat it.

Article SEM couldn’t be ‘the latest thing’ if there weren’t others preceding it. Its closest relative would have to be ‘Forum Posting for Text Links’ methods used last year by a great many web marketing pundits. This one was the same idea but just a lot more labor.
Companies would hire people, usually offshore labor, and have them go to high ranking forums/message boards and make posts with the company text link in the signature. Oh yes my friends, they PAY people to go and do this form of marketing/data entry. It’s piece work, paid by number of posts.
What happened to that one? Well search engines caught onto the concept as well and adjusted their algorithms to ‘see’ matching text links for the same site or unique 'Class C' IP address and treat them as one, not multiple links as intended by those ‘savvy’ marketers. Complete waste of money now isn’t it?

The algorithm has similarly changed in regards to reciprocal linking strategies. They have been greatly devalued with recent algorithm updates at the major SEs (search engine). For many years now webmasters and SEO folks have been spending a great deal of time and money obtaining reciprocal links to their sites. Those same recip-links can actually hurt ones positioning now. Many have paid good money to get punished by the new ‘rules’. Worse than a complete waste of money.

Blogs? Naw, spammers got them too. As reported by Andrew Orlowski over at the Register, “Recently, we featured a software tool that can create 100 Blogger weblogs in 24 minutes, called Blog Mass Installer. A subterranean industry of sites providing "private label articles," or PLAs exists to flesh out "content" for these freshly minted sites. And as a result, legitimate sites are often caught in the cross fire.”

The Sky is falling! The Sky is falling! The Sky is falling!

Now for a little ‘the end is near’ fear mongering. In recent months, in an effort to come to grips with Googles latest algorithm rollout Big Daddy, many in the SEO have been suggesting Google is filling up and can’t deal with the sheer volume of it’s 8 billion plus listings. Some evidence of unhappiness in Gmail land as reported by By Saul Hansell of The New York Times, “Referring to the sheer volume of Web site information, video and e-mail that Google's servers hold, Schmidt said: "Those machines are full. We have a huge machine crisis."” And that’s just the email load.

So while I try to work out the long term value of article writing for SEO, I can’t help but think this practice will have a deleterious effect on the end user, The Web Surfer. With loads high and technology struggling to keep up, an end-run on getting articles of varying degrees on quality probably won’t make things any better. So for the sake of all the web surfers now and in the future I will try to keep my article writing to a minimum. I hope this one helped start some further dialogue.