Article marketing has become an overnight online sensation. Before, the use of articles for promoting products and services is only done through newsletters and leaflets that are being distributed through mail or through flyer giving. Article marketing has also crossed over to the newspapers and magazines with more and more articles coming from companies that have products to promote.

In recent years however, article marketing has been widely used over the internet to also sell products, lend credibility to the site and to increase the site rank in search engines. Article marketing now does not only promote products, it also promotes the site itself. Through the use of these articles, the rank of the site in search engines like Google and Yahoo, will increase.

The use of article marketing is actually one of the reasons why the world wide web has become a treasure throve of information. In order to promote their sites, site developers and owners will need to submit fresh materials everyday. This will increase their page views fro site visitors as well as improve their site rank. With your website appearing in the first page of a search engine result, you are guaranteed more views and of course the support of online advertisers.

But the wide use of articles for site rank has made the quality of the articles suffer. Just look at the way article are written when you click the sites in the search engine results. Most will have the same exact content as the other. Some may not be the verbatim version but the principles and essence of the article is the same. A lot of them will have typos on the articles as well as misspellings. Articles are also not well-written. They will have structure problems, cohesion problems and of course mistakes in grammar.

Another problem with the articles found over the internet as a result of article marketing is the absence of a byline. Without a byline, the articles will not have any credibility and reliability. When before medical topics are written by doctors, now most of them will only be done by individuals who also research over the internet.

Because the idea of the websites is to promote their sites and to increase the rank, they are coming up with articles that are written just for the heck of it. They are not anymore in the mission of providing information to readers. What they are doing is for their benefit. This is why some of these websites will also feature information that are unreliable.

Only a couple of websites feature articles that are bylined. There are also sites that may not have any bylines but are being kept by people who are experts in the field. This is why it is also important to check the websites first before you cite them for your research. Sites that are being maintained by the government will of course have pretty reliable content. The same goes with international organizations like those of the United Nations. Some local sites being run by non-profit organization also have reliable content. Medical sites that are maintained by universities and hospitals are also great sources of information.

Before you research over the internet, check your sources. Article marketing online has definitely changed the way we do research. It might have made researching easier but it made discriminating harder.