The end of article marketing?

Sometimes when I look at articlesbase, ezine and even google serp for certain keywords, I feel they more and more tend to look... hmm... spammy, so to say. I mean, they are full of "keyword-rich 250 words" garbage with affiliate links in it. It reminds me google serp of some years ago -- full of doorway pages.
It also seems to me that the article directories really have only two options: either to become a spammers' pool, or to ensure strict moderation, forbid outbound links and like that. Or google can penalize the inner pages of article directories to clear serp of "keyword rich 250 words blah-blah-blah"... And if it happens -- it will be the end of article marketing?
It is very interesting to hear any idea on the above matter and if it has any value now to invest in article writing and submission.

 

Please, can you give a example for few articles, which are you written about?

 

Article marketing still works, although not as well as it used to do

 

You can try google.com for "Tips How to View Private Myspace Profiles", for example. Or this.
I do not accuse anybody or something like that, by the way. Nothing personal, just business. And of course everybody has his own views on what is "spammy" and what is not.

 

Well, I can certainly agree that Ezinearticles.com have lowered their standards. Just a couple of years ago when browsing through articles there the work was much better. It seems now that they are basically accepting nearly anything regardless of sentence structure and grammar. Now whether or not that will affect article marketing, I do not really know. I don't know why that site is still considered to be 'it' when it comes to directories.

 

IMO article marketing works at the moment. On its current course though I agree it will eventually offer nothing to marketeers.

 

It will never "die" - it will just evolve and all the crap that has been building up on it will die. It's called evolution and those who can adapt will flourish.

 

i think people are less likely to read them but it can still help with page rank...

 

There are some very high quality articles on directories such as ezine, however there is also a deluge of badly written, keyword rich tripe. The limitless possibilities of the internet enables anyone to publish online, so perhaps it is up to the reader to be discerning as to what they take from the internet.

 

you are absolutely right.. these $20 articles are written for a specific purpose.. some of the articles do fill a niches otherwise wouldn't have been written.. but most of them do look spammy.. google will take notice and value it down accordingly.

 

And only a few months ago they had a big promotion about tightening standards, etc. Even talked about how they had progressively improved over the years!

I have never seen an article there that I would consider using on my site. Grammar and spelling, as you said, are completely ignored, and I find that unforgiveable.

That being said, though, it does seem that the better quality articles rank better in Google and the better writers are read more. Maybe quality rises from the trash.

 

I would say article marketing is virtually dead.

 

I think the real issue here is that nobody knows how to write anymore, and everybody's consumed with getting the best price they can for a writer. So instead of producing quality content, they buy cheap crap from some third-world outsourcer who doesn't even speak English... and since nobody really reads anymore, the client doesn't even notice that what he got back is garbage. So he sends it to EZA, and if he gets lucky, the editor's drunk or stoned or just can't be arsed to do his job - so he says "fork it, I'll just mass-approve the rest of the queue."

Article marketing, in other words, has gotten big enough that 90% of it is crap. Just like everything else.

But if you use quality articles, it still works.

 

Amen, dude.

 

Amen twice...

Article marketing will continue to work but higher quality directories will take the place of EZA, simple. Google's revenue is directly connected to the relevancy and quality of info provided to searchers so it won't be long before they pull the plug on EZA. It happened with Hubpages faster because of lack of moderation but no one is untouchable.

 

I would say that you don't know what you are talking about.

 

So you think article directories is the only source for article marketing?

 

Thanks a lot to everybody for the answers!

It will be highly appreciated if you give maybe just a hint at other sources.

 

Article marketing achieves much better results than magazine advertising but the articles have to be well written and targeted to relevant demographics. Good article writers can make more from AdSense than they do selling articles - even if they have to wait.

I still can't believe that someone would sell an original 500 word article for $2 - if that's all I was going to make I can't imagine how pants the article would be. It takes a person of average intelligence a few nano seconds to realise that an article is poor and bounce off.

All this keyword swamping makes for a bad reader experience and a bad experience of any kind is not going to market any product or service no matter how brilliant it is...

 

Askmen, Yahoo, MSN, About....

ANY site out there that has resonable to a lot of traffic.

Come on, man, did you really have to ask that question?