What has happened in the field of article marketing?
Lots in the past several months. For starters, Google has killed the golden goose by not allowing duplicate article backlinks. Google's "no follow" policy has essentially killed the biggest advantage of article marketing. My article on Mexico City is now buried back in the SERPs and falling...six months ago such an article would have shot to the top and the first page might have had three or four entries.
This has had a major effect on article marketing sites. In the past month I have been spammed by one site, had my article distibutions cut in half by another and have experienced a greatly reduced number of generated backlinks.
My service provider is giving incentives to upgrade membership and has actively been reducing the number of submissions...roughly by half...to ensure that they do not submit to "black hole" sites. These "black hole" sites have actually become a negative as the author may in fact be penalized by Google et al by having articles placed there.
That's not to say that the article marketing industry will not come back, but for now it is certainly down. The questions that remains is it in fact 'out'....
