I returned to revisit content marketing over the Xmas break 2018, as it has been nearly 8 years since I was active, but even I was surprised by the extent of change in this niche.
Firstly in 2006-2010 when I was active in the niche it was all about numbers, sheer volumes My main site back in those days Article Alley built up to be over 2,000,000 posts! After the Google Panda update I progressively reduced this down to the best 75,000 but reviewing these now - even these are not very impressive at all these days. It is amazing to think that I was getting 350,000 pages views ever day at that time and Article Alley was amongst the top 10,000 sites in the world at the time.
Secondly as it was a numbers game articles were typically around 500 words, so really just the minimum that could be justified to carry the "payload" which was a link to which ever site the author wanted to promote.
Now in 2019 the world is a different place for sure, Articles only perform if they are unique within a site, and across the wider web and ( a big and! ) are of a high quality. Also users are looking for rich content that catches their imagination so this typically means imags, videos, podcasts or other engaging content.
A lot has been learnt about the length of posts, articles need to be in the range 2,000-4,000 words to perform well, which is a huge change from before, poor grammar and other nonsensical text are not tolerated.
Indexing - Not only does Google push down content that does not meet its criteria it pushes down whole sites (the Google Panda update started this in Feb 2011) but in 2018/19 it now doesn't index pages at all. Reviewing Article Alley, a site which basically has not been touched since 2012 large sections of previous high performing content are not even indexed at all. This is a site with a ahrefs score of 70 still!
I have decided to take on board all of the above developments are redevelop the site, as I have an attachment to it, having spent around 3 years of my life working on it ever day between 2006 and 2010. I've bought a new script which incorporates most of the features that the competition use, my coder is customising the script to include the features that are needed to cope in the current market.
As it may be the case that Article Alley has some kind of manual flag so I am also working on a new url, that way I can see how a fresh domain works as a benchmark Brasskangaroo is the name of the new site which I am using to develop the new version and once completed I will customise a design so this is then a unique stand alone site in its own right.
As you can see from the screen shot the new look site makes a lot more out of images and videos than ever previously the case, it will be interesting indeed to see how the new version site progresses.
