I stopped affiliate marketing back in 2010 (early), however after an almost two year hiatus I'm planning on getting back into it, as I made the bulk of my internet monies there.

Being a fairly active member of this forum and the "internet business" community in general, I have of course heard about Google's step up to low quality content farms in the former of panda updates over the past year or so.

However, until testing out some theories tonight, I was never really sure of how far it had gone. I used to be able to type in any easily monetized long tail, e.g. "watch ufc [event no] online" and see the first few pages littered with results from EA, ArticlesBase, GoArticles, etc - but now they appear to be completely gone.

I went through over 10 pages of results for the term "watch ufc 144 online" (the next UFC event), just to find a single article site post, which ironically was one of mine from like 3 years ago.

However, that said, I'm seeing tonnes of what I would call "content farms" still existent in SERPs which leads me to believe they have have gone after high level article sites by purpose instead of through massive algorithmic changes (separate to panda).

Does anyone else feel this is what might have happened or have any other information regarding the disappearance of articles sites?

From someone who used to do SEO purely by ranking for long tails through articles (I had about 250-300k article views on my ArticlesBase account if I remember correctly), it seems like there's little to no point even incorporating articles into a 2012 relevant SEO strategy.

Any opinions?

(I know the above isn't really a straightforward question; I'm more looking for other opinions of others who currently implement SEO strategies).

I still incorporate articles into my seo strategy, granted to a lesser degree then in the past but its still a viable way to create backlinks. Those backlinks may not be as strong as they once were but they a least help with a bit of backlink diversification and makes a link profile look somewhat more natural.