BMR is Dead – What to do with Short Articles Directory?

The first jaw dropping news I’ve read today via InfoBarrel forums is the fact that Build My Rank or BMR is dead. A short article from BMR’s own blog confirms this. Yes, that huge network of link building domains has been removed from Google’s index. It didn’t dawn upon me immediately but I eventually realized its impact to me. What will I do with the Short Articles Directory site?

Before answering that question, it’s best to talk about BMR first. I wrote about this service in this post Why Build My Rank Ranks Number One IMO. BMR is one of the largest link building companies online with thousands of domain names acquired for the purpose of hosting short articles with links embedded. These links are of course for their clients’ sites or blogs.

Google made a recent update in its algorithm which affected BMR’s sites. Artificially planted links collected in one single domain is no longer allowed. Thus, BMR’s sites which rely heavily on the collection of links had been hammered. Google had removed sites which serve as a means to gather unrelated links and articles into a massive domain, despite the articles being technically original.

This major event on the web community will definitely impact many. There are thousands of agencies, contractors, and freelancers who make a living out of writing and posting content for BMR. I had a taste of how it is to write for BMR once although it ended up in a dramatic fraudulent experience (see the same link about BMR above). It’s not my type of writing although it appears to be easier than the usual web content writing that I know about. I’m sure BMR writers can relate to the fact that writing BMR articles become routinely boring over time.

There’s something good which can be gained from this whole BMR is dead event. We can expect less of the grinding, scraping, and spinning of articles. Most BMR articles are just recycled short articles which are grinded, scraped, and spun from previously written articles on the same theme or topic. They are edited to make them appear new or original and republished for BMR again. Since I didn’t write for BMR too long, I never got the chance to have a taste of reusing articles. Although for related articles, I did get to reuse the same idea over and over again and just wrote them differently each time.

No one knows if this move from Google is going to be permanent or may just be temporary. But it made me wonder what’s going to happen to other BMR-like sites such Short Articles Directory? I haven’t even posted all excess articles yet but now BMR is dead. I tried to search for other related sites and have found out that most of them are still indexed, so did Short Articles Directory. It appears that only BMR is affected by the Google update. This can be due to the fact that BMR’s sites contain a humongous amount of short articles and links.  

The fate of BMR is yet to be decided. As to what happens to their domains and content is something we can only wait for and see.