Is article writing dead?

Shock! Gasp! Horror! Article writing is now pointless and article marketing services are dead! So thought many people when the much-misunderstood algorithm update known commonly as 'Farmer' was introduced to the internet marketing world by Google. The panic was palpable, and you could almost smell the fear in many of the hysterical blog posts and articles written on this dreadful thing that Google had just done to us.
Google Protects its Customers
All nonsense, of course, because Google generally does not harm those responsible for its existence, even if only marginally responsible, but it does protect those people it regards as its customers. These are those for whom Google is a tool to find information - not those using the search engine as a marketing tool or to advertise!
If you are offering good information on your web pages, or using article directories, then article writing will be alive and well and article marketing services will continue to enable you to promote your information sites. Web pages will naturally be expected to provide useful information in response to a search using specific keywords, although sites dedicated to sales are still regarded as acceptable by Google since they provide customers with a needed service. So what is the reason for the introduction of this change in the search algorithm in February?
The Panda-Farmer Algorithm Update
Even though the dust has settled, and everybody has had their two cents worth of comments and explanations, there is still a great deal of misunderstanding. I am certainly not perfect, and am sure that many people won't agree with much of what I write here. They have every right to do so, but with many years experience as an article ghostwriter who uses article marketing services as his major means of marketing I reckon that I too am permitted to offer my opinion on the matter.
Article writing was not Google's target, and neither were the article marketing services that still enable you to use articles to promote your websites and your products. Google's target was the plethora of badly written information, in short:
• Articles spun from a master article
• Bad rewrites of PLR articles
• Poor article writing offering little benefit to the reader
• Articles offering little information, designed only to get clicks to sales pages
• Very short articles with fewer than 400 words
• Articles with significant spelling errors
• Articles written with very poor grammar
• Software-generated articles taken from scraped web content
In short, Google is attempting to improve the quality of content being provided to its customers who are seeking useful information. This was content in the form of both web page content and published articles. Google does not want their users to find the same information on page after page, even if it is wrtitten in slightly different ways. The last thing that will impress them is finding badly written text that is practically unreadable.
If the alternative names given to the algorithm update are confusing, the name Panda was given to it by Google itself, after the engineer who created it. The name Farmer was given to it by others because it appeared to them to be targeting the so-called 'content farms'. This was not exactly true, although content farms appeared to be affected mostly due to the relatively poor content that many of them (but not all) had to offer.
The Future of Article Marketing Services
Article marketing services are going strong, and you can still promote your web pages by publishing well-written articles of reasonable length that provide useful content that is related to the title. It's important that any clickable links in the article or its resource section takes readers to a web page that is directly related to the topic of your article - this is another important factor of good article writing that many people do not seem to understand.
Another factor in a well written article is that it should not be stuffed with keywords. Even using a 1% keyword density could be regarded as excessive now. Keyword-stuffing became extinct when Google introduced its LSI (latent semantic indexing) algorithm update. The key to achieving high search engine listings with a well-written article is to write naturally, and not force in keywords where they don't belong.
Response of Article Directories
The reaction of article directories was to tighten up on their editorial guidelines. Many, including Ezine Articles, increased their minimum word count to 400, and it is now more difficult to get an article approved by many directories. The are giving closer inspection to the quality of content and grammar.
Because they are finding their articles being refused by the directories, many believe article writing to have lost its benefit as a marketing tool, and that article marketing services are now dead or dying. Nothing could be more wrong. On the contrary, it is now significantly easier to achieve high listings in the Google results pages for your articles, since the vast majority of substandard articles and web pages have been removed from the search engine index.
Article writing services are as alive as they have ever been, and article writing is still an extremely useful and potent tool in internet marketing.