So I am doing a link building campaign based on articles right now. I have noticed however that the keywords I am targeting with these articles are not going up in rank but rather down. Has google made some change to devalue articles now?
nopes but google takes some time to cache your articles and google give max priority to context links
Article marketing is still a good way to build links, however, there are right ways and wrong ways to go about it. The wrong way is to have hundreds of articles out there with the same content and anchor text. The right way is to mix things up by spinning or rewriting the article and using variations of your anchor text.
do not do mass stuff, submit 20-25 articles to the best article directories and that's it... and all the rewritten, not the same articles... if you want to go more, just in the same directories submit but with deeper linking or another anchor lik simpseo said.
google give more value good quality articles. ezine , Article dashboard. Now at present time article marketing is the best method of website promotion.
I don't have much idea regarding article but one thing I came through submission that press release give more benefit in SERP. I submitted two press release to 25 site each press release and within few days the SERP of those keywords were sky high.
Yeah! If you go for Quality Article Marketing websites like EzineArticles, Buzzle, GoArticles and IdeaMarketers because these websites provide Do-Follow Links and gives amazing exposure on Search Engine prospective
This is a pretty common for Google. It has been like this for several years already. Most of new content / new articles under website or even article directory will have a "temporarily high ranking" for a certain period before dropped later. It is because of "fresh content" factor after all. That certain content might be delegated after a period of time "or might be not" depend on how authority of root domain. The good example are Wikipedia and Ezinearticles.com. You would see their article has a strong ranking in many long tail keywords without efforts promoting it. A content on CNN news is the same. This could help you illustrate the idea how it's work.
you mean that you submitted 2 press releases to 25 sites each. Was that the same list of 25 sites or different?
Probably you are being too fast to submit articles? I heared that Google hates links from duplicate contents..
Links in mass article directories are low quality links. Your rankings should not go down permanently but unless your keyphrases are very uncompetitive, don't expect too much from article directories. Press releases have given me good results though.
Google takes some time to give value to your back links. If you are building back links with articles, keep working on and on the same time perform some other off page SEO activities. Because Google consider links through different sources, you must work through different sources and try to post your articles on some quality article directories, where your pages/articles get easily cached.