Top #20 article directories and Page/Alexa Rank

[John Tighe]

I've been doing a lot of article marketing recently and I thought it might be helpful to put together my list of top 20 sites.

The sites that have made it onto the list have done so based on a combination of Alexa Rank and Page Rank: ie, a site has to have a good combination of both to make it onto the list.

For convenience, I've arranged the sites in order based on their Alexa ranking.

Please feel free to add your suggestions if you think there are other sites that should have made the cut!

Page Rank

Even though links may be no-follow I felt that Page Rank was an important ingredient as the higher the PR the more likely your article is to show in the organic results.

Figures in brackets = 2007 rankings

The figures in brackets show the sites' respective rankings in May 2007 - I've added these because they give an indication of which sites are on the way up and which are on the way down.

It's interesting to see how many of the sites (11) have lost page rank in the last couple of years. Only two - ArticleBase and GoArticles - have gained page rank. Of the remainder, three have stayed the same and there are four sites for which I don't have figures - these are marked (n/a).

Of the 16 sites for which I have figures all of them have increased their Alexa ranking.

EzineArticles remains the Daddy of them all, but ArticleBase is catching up fast.

My personal top three (marked with an *) are EzineArticles, ArticleBase and GoArticles. In addition to their combination of high Alexa and Page rankings, these seem to be the sites that are most likely to get your article a high organic ranking in the search engines.

John

Alexa Rank / Page Rank

EzineArticles.com * 128 (499) / 6 (6)

ArticleBase.com * 471 (8735) / 5 (4)

Buzzle.com 1343 (9698) / 5 (6)

GoArticles.com * 1647 (3592) / 6 (4)

ArticleSnatch.com 2486 (n/a) / 4 (n/a)

ArticleAlley.com 3089 (14259) / 5 (5)

ArticleDashboard.com 3265 (5255) / 5 (6)

IdeaMarketers.com 4529 (13121) / 3 (4)

Amazines.com 4703 (17509) / 2 (5)

SelfGrowth.com 4843 (9653) / 5 (6)

SearchWarp.com 5848 (6032) / 5 (6)

iSnare.com 8374 (8791) / 6 (6)

EasyArticles.com 8792 (n/a) / 4 (n/a)

ArticleRich.com 8982 (n/a) / 3 (n/a)

ArticleCity.com 9029 (11526) / 5 (6)

ArticleTrader.com 9303 (17633) / 3 (5)

SelfSEO.com 9930 (15945) / 3 (5)

ArticleBiz.com 10983 (49044) / 5 (6)

ArticlesFactory.com 16040 (30664) / 4 (7)

uPublish.info 18811 (n/a) / 4 (n/a)


Alexa rank and Page Rank are as listed on 17-19th December.

The problem is PR means nothing and Alexa rank certainly mean nothing .. To base a article directory on those 2 things to consider it a top article directory is a huge mistake.

There are many other article directories that have many options those ones you mentioned above do not have. The smaller article directories can get you top rankings a great deal easier and plus the competition on the smaller article directories are far less.. Meaning greater CTR for your articles..

James

[fredjr1978]

Thanks for taking the time to write this all out in a post....very helpful! I will be sure to go you a "thank you".

[InternetMarketingIQ]

You need to base a list on something, but I'm not sure Alexa is a good choice.

Take a look at articles in the categories that you are considering and see if they are ranking. Do a little reverse engineering.

Take the hubpages tour HubPages Tour and then ask yourself if you want to give your work away for free for the article directory to profit from in the hopes of getting traffic, or if you want to get paid for both!

[Davioli]

Whatever everyone says. PR iis a good enough estimate of Google Authority..especially if it has stayed constant for a long time and correlates with a good Alexa Rank.
You can flame this guy's findings all you want... there's no escaping the fact that the directories mentioned above pass on alot more link juice than relatively smaller directories.

Originally Posted by TheRichJerksNet

The problem is PR means nothing and Alexa rank certainly mean nothing .. To base a article directory on those 2 things to consider it a top article directory is a huge mistake.

There are many other article directories that have many options those ones you mentioned above do not have. The smaller article directories can get you top rankings a great deal easier and plus the competition on the smaller article directories are far less.. Meaning greater CTR for your articles..

James

Smaller article directories have very low traffic as a whole when compared to Big dirs like EZA. With big article dirs there's more of a chance that your article will get to the first page of Google for a long tail keyword and get you traffic and potentially clicks to your link.

[schibs]

thanks for putting this together!

[John Tighe]

Originally Posted by TheRichJerksNet

The problem is PR means nothing and Alexa rank certainly mean nothing .. To base a article directory on those 2 things to consider it a top article directory is a huge mistake.

There are many other article directories that have many options those ones you mentioned above do not have. The smaller article directories can get you top rankings a great deal easier and plus the competition on the smaller article directories are far less.. Meaning greater CTR for your articles..

James

Thanks for your feedback James. There are certainly some good niche directories out there that are ideal for getting highly targetted traffic if that happens to be your niche. (If people have any they'd like to suggest that would be cool! )

What I was trying to do with this top 20 (apart from stimulate a bit of healthy discussion ) is provide a general resource with links to some good sites that would be useful to a broad cross section of Warriors.

Re the "other options" you mention, can you elaborate on this? Like I said in the OP if you think there are other sites that should be in the list instead let us know!

Re Alexa and Page Ranks, I agree that they're not perfect as metrics. Page Rank may be out of date and Alexa Rank is only an approximation.

However, I still think they're useful as a guide. A site with a high Alexa Rank clearly is getting more traffic. If enough of that traffic is going through to read articles in the niche you are targetting (you can get a pretty good idea on most sites) then you have the opportunity to reach a wide readership.

This is where article and headline writing skills come in. It doesn't matter how much traffic is coming to the directory if:

1) the headline is poor - no one's going to click on it
2) the article and resource box is poor - no one's going to click on the link

In other words all the article generates is link juice, which is fine if that's the objective.

Personally, if I'm going to take the trouble to get an article onto a site I want BOTH link juice and click throughs!

Plus, if a site has a "most read" section like EZA does, then a good headline will get your article listed there. Then you're going to get a lot more internal links back to it, which increases the chances it will get ranked organically.

Which brings me on to Page Rank. It's not the only thing to consider - of course - but, I think that publishing on a site with a high PR can increase your chances of getting your article ranked organically. (And ideally, you'd like a high PR site that is focused on your particular niche to maximise your chances of an organic listing.)

[John Tighe]

Here's one that probably should have made the list:

theFreeLibrary.com

Alexa Rank: 3,730

Page Rank: 7