Content marketing has long been the driving force to get targeted traffic and quality links for your internet marketing strategy. In 2011, Google started rolling out a new update to their algorithm called “Panda” which focused on removing all the websites with black hat SEO to remove irrelevant content from their search result pages. The Panda update hit the content marketing industry very hard.

Many content marketers and agencies used the duplicate article approach where they would write a single content item, and then use a n article spinning service to create different variants of the same content piece. Using this method, you can create hundred versions of the same content item, all with slight variations. These “spinned” articles were then placed on thousands of directories across the web and each one had a link pointing back to the website that was targeted.

Fooling Google

For a very long time they used this method by fooling Google to get good results, until the first version of the Google Panda update was released. This turned their world upside down. The duplicated and spinned versions of their content were de-indexed and thrown into the Google Sandbox. The links that the content generated were stopped counting and most of the traffic to these content directories that featured the duplicated content were knocked down. Many internet marketers stated that this was the end of content marketing.

To be honest, it wasn’t the end of content marketing, and content is still king, just don’t duplicate versions of your content. Content marketing after the Panda update is different. Your web content needs to be informative, relevant, original, interesting, and it should be unique. Content marketing is no longer a simple numbers game. It is all about writing and publishing quality content and placing them from high authority web properties.

Content marketing after the Panda update

What should you focus on when writing new content? Have a look below on a few tips that will help you with this.

  • Always focus on content quality over quantity
  • Publish and submit relevant, unique, and interesting content on trusted article directories
  • Use only original content
  • Submit your content to directories that can pass link popularity to your website