ezine or blog

I'm afraid you're just factually mistaken, Dee.

EzineArticles don't and never did require unique articles. Have a slow read of their Terms of Service, Editorial Guidelines, Blog and so on. Not only do they not prohibit non-unique articles, they openly invite and encourage authors to submit their existing, pre-published articles to them.

They even had a Wordpress plugin available, until recently, to aid with the submission of people's already published articles to their directory. If they only wanted unique content, they wouldn't very well have made this plugin available, would they?

The only requirement in relation to submitting pre-published/non-unique articles is that they are submitted under the same author-name as anywhere else they're published, for copyright reasons.

This is completely wrong.

For all the reasons explained by so many successful article marketers in this thread, it's very important, for your own site's long-term SEO, to publish your articles and have them indexed on your own site first, before submitting them to EZA (or anywhere else).

In the introductory email series that EZA sends out to all new authors who register there, they specifically invite the submission there of any articles previously published on the authors' own sites.

They also do the same thing on their blog.

As you can see from this thread, people can register there as authors, submit 10 previously-published blog-posts and immediately get to "Platinum" status.

EZA also has (or had until recently) a special Wordpress plug-in, produced (free of charge) for their authors, to enable people to post articles on their own blogs and at the same time submit them to EZA for approval for subsequent publication there.

Like hundreds of other article marketers, all my EZA articles (and that's over 1,400 now) were published elsewhere (some of them even in several places), prior to EZA submission.

Immediately after Google's recent algorithm change, EZA held an open discussion on their blog, in which they (briefly) raised the possibility of for the first time not accepting content previously published elsewhere. Predictably enough, many of their top authors more or less said "We obviously won't be submitting to your directory any more, if you do that", and they very rapidly recanted the suggestion and announced that they wouldn't, after all, change their policy in this regard.

To describe them as "particular about unique articles" really couldn't be much more misleading, I'm afraid. As Michael wisely comments above, it's just factually mistaken.

It's not as simple as "which will drive more traffic", Krestup.

You also have to think about where you're driving that traffic.

"I have a 25% click-through rate at Ezine Articles" is another way of saying "I lose 75% of my traffic at Ezine Articles".

It's important, in the long run, to make sure that when a potential customer finds one of your articles by putting one of its keywords into a search engine, the copy of the article he finds is the one on your own site, not the one in an article directory, otherwise you lose most of the traffic. Fortunately, with article directories having been hammered so much by Google's recent algorithm change (the so-called "Panda update"), this is very easy to do.

It would make very little sense indeed to give an article directory the initial indexation rights to any of your articles. There's no point in giving a directory "unique content": you can lose by doing this, but in the long run you can never gain from it (when compared with the alternative).

Sorry Dee, Mike (Direstraits) is spot on and you're not, I'm afraid.

I'm not going to go into detail, Alexa and Mike have already said it and if I repeat it I may well be the millionth person to have done so. However if you'd like to keep doing lots of work to help out EZA, go for it chap.

Incidentally, why give the article to EZA then rewrite it heavily? If it's going to be rewritten "heavily" then you have 2 almost different articles.

Either way, they should both be indexed on your site first. You're trying to build up your business Dee, not Chris Knights.