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Matt Cutts: Honestly I’m not a huge fan of article marketing. I mean if you think about it you’re writing an article and you try to include a link at the bottom and you’re hoping a bunch of other people put up copies or mirrors or duplicates of that article and that those links might flow through.

Typically the sorts of sites that just republish these articles are not the highest quality sites. A lot of times the articles themselves are not the highest quality where someone will say you have to write x number of words and someone will write exactly x number of words.

You end up with a lot of duplicate content across the web, sometimes duplicate anchor text. So if I had to foresee what does the trend hold, these are not really editorial links where somebody is really making the choice that this is a great site as a lot of other links on the web.

So, should you pursue article marketing? I would probably lean away from that and lean more towards great content that naturally has links, some good social media marketing so that people are linking to it organically for reasons that they really love it rather than someone needs five articles to put up on their website and they just go to this article bank somewhere, grab five articles and then slap it up on their website.

That tends to be not as high quality in terms of links as you know regular links that people are actually deliberately making across the web.

So if I had to make a prophecy or forecast about how Google feels or how search engines feel about them in general, the trend that I am hearing and the sort of complaints that I am hearing are that people are not huge fans of article marketing and don’t view it as an incredible value add in terms of the content that gets added to the web.