Article marketing is for my reckoning, the most boring chore on the planet. Every time my to-do list springs up an item that requires me to visit Ezine, I shed tears of sorrow, snap a kitten in half, and beg for it all to go away.
Just who was the smart arse to decide that such monotonous crap should ever be rewarded by Google?
The benefits, or pointlessness, of article marketing can be argued over all day long. I don’t like to ruffle feathers when it comes to SEO. Everybody has a different opinion over what works, what doesn’t, and what classifies as a gigantic waste of time. If I had my way, I would confine the entire art of SEO to the latter.

What is unlikely to bring back your traffic is an appeal to public opinion or the sympathetic hearts of Google’s search engineers. Google extensively tests their algorithm changes to improve search quality and they don’t roll out substantial changes like this unless their internal data shows a marked improvement. Google is a data-driven company, so anecdotal reports just don’t stand up against hard numbers.
A recent Wired article implied that Google did in fact look into and fix individual cases, but Google clarified that this was not the case and emphasized that this change is entirely algorithmic and that their internal data has found the change to improve search quality overall. So while they plan to continue to refine things, they aren’t going to roll the change back.

When Google updated its algorithm late last week to weed out low-quality content factories from the top of search results, the changes didn’t sit well with all.
Many well-known sites that pop up in search results despite having little good information, including Associated Content and Mahalo, were downgraded, according to an analysis by independent SEO software firm Sistrix.
And then there is Cult of Mac, an Apple-focused blog which took a beating — losing nearly all of its Google juice in the change, and causing traffic to the site to fall by one-third to one-half over the weekend.