What’s Killing the Article Directories?
Over the last ranking sweep, Google has dropped the Page Rank on most of the article directories by at least one point, with some losing all ranking completely. So why have they seen such a dramatic drop in page rank lately? What’s killing the article directories?
Page rank isn’t particularly meaningful to the average web page, but for an article directory who competes for submission intake, having a high level of popularity and rank is extremely important. The general concept among those who submit articles is, the higher the page rank an article directory has, the more good it’ll do them. So its not surprising that the higher ranked sites get more article intake than lower ranked directories.
Last year there were three article directories with a PR8 ranking, now there’s one. Some directories saw a drop from PR4 to PR0 this time around, PR6 sites are now PR5 or 4, and there are far more PR0 sites than there ever was before. With the vast majority of article marketers submitting only to the top ten sites, these drops are significant and could indicate the end to a lot of back linking and exposure opportunity.
So what’s happening?
Well for one thing, there’s the new Universal indexing going on among the search engines. What this means is now the article directories aren’t just competing with each other or other web pages for listings, but now they’re up against video, blog posts, social media, images and all sorts of other news sources. Google in particular has mashed all sources of content onto one search page rather than keeping video, images, and blogs in separate searches.
To make a long story short, all this indicates that content, or to be even more specific, good quality content is what drives the search engines. So to compete with all these other sources, article directories will have to be far more particular when accepting articles in order to hold on to their ranking.
And this could be a tall order considering the love affair Google has with video and blogging platforms like YouTube, Blogger.com, and Wordpress.com.
If the article directories are going to survive, they’re going to have to significantly clean up their act by providing only the best quality content they can find. However, they have a tough uphill climb because they’re contending with a high level of bad intake.
For example, somewhere along the line the idea that “unique” meant reworded, has spawned a number of “article spinning” programs that merely changes a few words in an article or rearranges the paragraph structure. The semantics of the article is usually the same, and so the search engines view them as basically the same content.
Now having the same article spread out over all the article directories won’t hurt anything, but if there’s a number of articles on the same directory all saying the same thing, the search engines’ duplicate content policy will effect the article directory. Multiply that by thousands of “spun” article being submitted on a daily basis, and you can see how this might effect the article directories value for content.
In essence, the misconceptions people have about duplicate content are creating duplicate content penalties on the article directories, and thus is a big part of making them fall in Page Rank.
Duplicate content only applies when the same content appears over and over again on the same site in order to fool the index bots into thinking the site has a lot of relevance to a given keyword. Having the same article posted on thousands of article directories increases the content’s value because of the sheer number of sites accepting and sharing it to their readers.
But when the same article, spun but with the same general content appears on the same article directory, it triggers the duplicate content penalties and thereby hurts the directory itself. The more this happens, the worse it gets for the directories.
So if the article directories are going to survive, one of two things will have to occur. Either the directory moderators will have to start rejecting spun articles, or those who submit them will have to give up the practice and submit only truly unique articles.
In the long run, submitting completely new articles to the article directories will give them fresh content to display and will help them recover. This in turn will provide those who submit articles with a longstanding supply of quality back links, but will also attract more readers who will more likely follow a series of new articles than a bunch of articles all saying the same thing.
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