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Submissions to Ezine Articles

Posted: March 13th, 2011 | Author: Linda | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

Effective immediately, I will no longer be including Ezine Articles as one of the major article directory submissions I do in Step 1. As many of you know, Ezine Articles was slapped hard by Google in their recent “Farmer” update. That in itself is not a major concern to me. We are, after all, going for backlinks much more so than we are for direct article traffic. So if many of the pages at EZA are no longer ranking as well, that’s not a major concern with regards to backlinks. Also, I’ve found that a lot of articles are still ranking well. I’ve seen many major Google updates in the past where they pretty much reversed a lot of their initial update in the months following. They start by hitting certain sites with a sledgehammer, then later on access the results and roll some of it back. So I expect article directories to recover before long.

My major concern is that chaos is now reigning at Ezine Articles. Rather than looking at themselves, they seem to be blaming their writers for what happened. Even though they have always manually approved all articles published on their site, they’ve decided that this update was about quality, even though quite a few other high quality sites were likewise affected. No one really knows if that was the reason for the slap or if it was something entirely different. For all we know, their practice of filling every inch of their pages with Adsense could be the problem!

They are currently taking over a week to approve articles, and in some cases I’ve read about, it is taking 2 weeks. I currently have over 30 articles waiting for approval. As I’m sure you can understand, that totally messes up my submission schedule, as I can’t promote their published article with EZArticleLink if it is still waiting for approval.

They are also rejecting a lot of articles as supposedly not having enough original content. While that could certainly be a valid criticism of some articles, I’ve been quite surprised at the articles that have been flagged that way, both mine and other people’s that I have seen. I’ve had a couple that I went back and totally rewrote, making them 600-800 words with a lot of added information and examples. But once Ezine flags something, even if you go back and make all the corrections they ask for, they almost never approve them.

Sometimes articles get rejected because of the site they are linking to. They seem to now be doing something similar to the Google Adwords quality score. If your site doesn’t have a lot of information on it (such as happens with a squeeze page), they reject the article. Or if they don’t like the design (yes, I had someone’s article rejected because of the design of their site) or the subject matter. They are pretty much rejecting any articles that are review articles, especially if the resource box links to an affiliate site.

This might not be so hard to deal with if they were consistent and had actual written rules about what they accept and what they won’t. But quite often it comes down to which person reviews your article. There seems to be little consistency from one to another. I can look at their recently published articles every day and find many articles that are of poor quality and that break some of the new rules they seem to be using.

Another even more ominous sign of the panic mode they are operating under is that they are suddenly suspending writer accounts. Many people who have over 1,000 articles with them are suddenly finding their accounts suspended, and they are unable to find out why. That hasn’t happened to me, thank goodness, but it certainly makes me nervous.

Up until a week ago, I had over 1,000 articles published by Ezine Articles. I’ve had that account for over 8 years. During that whole time, only 3 articles were ever rejected. 2 were because the client wanted a review article about an affiliate product, and Ezine told me they wouldn’t accept those with a link in the resource box to a site promoting that affiliate product. The 3rd was because they didn’t like the design of the client’s site. But now all bets are off as to what articles they will or won’t accept, or how long they’ll take to approve them – if they eventually do.

Please note that many others have had even more trouble than I’m experiencing. There have been many threads on the Warrior Forum and elsewhere about the Ezine Article situation and the problem other writers are having with them.

As I’m sure you can understand, this makes it extremely hard to deal with Ezine Articles as a part of my submissions service. Clients ask for articles to be submitted on all types of subjects. While there are some that I don’t accept, that doesn’t mean that others won’t be a topic that Ezine Articles has suddenly decided to crack down on without informing their writers. The fact that I don’t know when articles will be approved – or if – makes it very difficult to have a smoothly running service that submits to certain places at specified times and that I don’t have to constantly babysit. Quite frankly, Ezine Articles has become a real pain in the backside. At this time, Ezine Articles is far more trouble than they are worth, particularly when there are other good directories that don’t make it so difficult on their writers. At one time, they were considered the best directory, so perhaps it was worth it to deal with the issues.

However, at this point, their backlinks are not worth more than other similar directories, as Google has just demonstrated. Ever since they started plastering their pages with Adsense ads and tons of other links, they don’t provide anywhere near as much link juice as they used to. On top of that, click through rates from article resource boxes have gone down a lot as well. So I no longer consider them the best article directory.

So until such time as they calm down and start being reasonable and transparent, I won’t be submitting to them. I will instead be submitting to a different directory such as Article Dashboard, iSnare, or Article Biz. So you will continue to get 4 major article directory submissions in addition to the 5 networks I submit to. I’m also considering a bonus submission to Article Ranks, which is another network. That would give each article another hundred or so extra submissions, and many more links. But I need to test them a bit first before I decide.