Everyone loves EzineArticles.com because they are probably the most widely known and most popular article directory on the internet. That may not be the case in a couple years if they don’t recover from Google’s Panda update. Just about everyone who uses article marketing right now has heard about EzineArticles.com.
The reason why EzineArticles.com became so popular is because they allow you to include a regular dofollow link in the resource box for your articles. Combine that with the fact that the homepage for their website has enjoyed a pretty impressive Google PageRank 6 rating for years and it makes for a very attractive place for internet marketers to build links.
Google’s Panda update spanked EzineArticles.com really hard in late February 2011. It hit them so hard that they toyed with the idea of removing the dofollow link privilege for authors. Some quick tongue lashing from its huge author base made them abandon the idea of changing that policy. Kudos to them for recognizing why authors were there in the first place. If they had added rel=”nofollow” to the author links then you can bet that 80-90 percent of authors would have deserted the site.
Prior to Panda you would see EzineArticles.com articles ranking in the top ten search results for all kinds of keyword searches. It was amazing how well you could get an article to rank in the search results by getting it published on their website. You still had to get some links to the article and promote it a bit, but the domain authority of their website gave them a huge ranking advantage over smaller less developed websites.
Since Google Panda though you don’t see their articles anywhere near as much as you did. I think that they are making a comeback, it’s just happening slowly.
Do the links from EzineArticles.com help your ranking more than links from other article directories?
The short answer to that question is no. The links from EzineArticles.com are not really going to be any more powerful than any other site’s links would be, at least not a noticeable amount. The articles you publish on EzineArticles.com are still going to be PR0 articles. They are going to have zero Google PageRank unless the articles acquire some links. If the articles get enough traffic for whatever reason, then the EzineArticles.com staff will send more internal link juice to the article. This results in the article ranking higher in Google. More traffic to your article means more publicity for your website and more traffic for it too. This could happen at any website or article directory that you publish at. EzineArticles.com does have more internal link juice than most of the others though. That is really their main advantage. Plus their brand is bigger and therefore may get your article more visibility than it would get elsewhere.
If you are a white hat article marketer who publishes high quality all original articles, then I think you would be smart to publish a handful of well written articles there. The purpose would be to get traffic directly from the articles there and to increase your brand exposure. I would not waste too much time trying to build a lot of links from that site to yours because your time could be better invested in expanding your backlink footprint. Publishing a new article on ten separate new article directories will give you more backlink power than publishing those ten articles on EzineArticles.com alone.
If EzineArticles.com is a PR6 site, then why aren’t the links more powerful?
Their links aren’t more powerful because you aren’t going to be getting links from their homepage. If you were getting links from their homepage then they would be a lot more powerful. Your links are going to be on articles that are buried deep inside their website with minimal exposure and minimal internal link juice. In that respect they are really not much different than any other site. They are probably a little bit better, but not by much.
If EzineArticles.com ever gets to a point where all of its articles are high quality then it probably would be a much better source of link juice. For now anyway, that is not the case.
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