HomeBlog AdvertisingThe Farmer Update and the Fall of Article Directories

The Farmer Update and the Fall of Article Directories

Google, the most popular and most widely used search engine, gives users search results based off of an algorithm called PageRank. All else being equal, sites with a higher PageRank will perform better in the search engine results than sites with a lower one, so it’s obviously in your best interest to know how to increase the PageRank of your sites.

One of the most popular and effective ways of improving the PageRank of a site is to point one-way links at it from other websites. This process is called link-building, and is an unavoidable necessity of modern search engine optimization.Recently, Google made a set of changes to the search algorithm that has been referred to as the “Farmer Update” by those in the industry.

This update lowered the PageRank of many popular article directories like EzineArticles, GoArticles, and ArticlesBase. The Farmer Update jolted the Internet marketing industry because so many people were relying on these article directories for link-building. Now, hundreds of thousands of these links are worth much less than they were before Google changed the algorithm, and people are still trying to recover their losses.Sites like the article directories listed above had their PageRank lowered because they tend to be full of low-quality content that isn’t very useful to the people who are searching for information. So many people were spamming the article directories just to get backlinks that Google had decided to take action.

The problems Google has with article directories are based around the farming of low-quality content that offers a bad experience for the user. Blog advertising is nothing like this, and in many cases is the exact opposite approach.

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Blog advertising provides high-quality content with a good user experience, and this makes for very good backlinks that are permanent, and not at risk of being devalued by Google. With the current Google update, there’s not much incentive for you to go with article directories for link-building anymore, but there are plenty of reasons you should try blog advertising.

Blog Advertising acts as a broker between people who are looking for high-quality backlinks relevant to their market niche and bloggers who are willing to write the blog posts in question.

The way it works is that an advertiser posts a set of job specifications, and this job listing goes to an open marketplace type area in their web interface for bloggers. Then the bloggers can pick up jobs that are relevant to their niche, and be paid for their blog-writing services.The links in blog posts of this style appear natural and not like they are a part of some grand linking scheme.

This means that these links will be valued highly by Google, and that you’ll never have to worry about any sort of penalties because of your links being from bad neighborhoods or not being placed with relevant content.

Blog Advertising Blows Article Directories Away

There really is no comparison between using article directories and using blog advertising for link-building. Blog advertising beats article directories by every metric possible, and if you use the Blog Advertising Store, you can also end up saving a lot of money. The Blog Advertising Store prices are up to 50% lower than the competition, and the links you get are of the highest quality.

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