does anyone have any statistics and measures from article directories

by IMDESTROYER Banned
5 replies
i was curious about the fall of article directories such as ezine and aquidoo
- Squidoo : Welcome to Squidoo
- http://ezinearticles.com/

and have notices that they have basically been replaced by by about and ehow
- eHow | How to Videos, Articles & More - Discover the expert in you.
- About.com: Do more.

one thing i did notice was the user friendly layout and how well ehow and about is visually appealing and informative compared to squidoo and ezine, wherein ezine is just way too much reading and information overload with nothing to compensate the titles of the articles.



Does anyone know where i can find an analysis to these companies failures. 3/5 years ago when i searched something ezone and squidoo were always the ones to pop up and now its always about, wikipedia and ehow.
#article #directories #measures #statistics
  • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
    Banned
    Originally Posted by IMDESTROYER View Post

    i was curious about the fall of article directories such as ezine and aquidoo
    Squidoo is not (in any sense of the words!) an article directory. Nor are "About" and "Ehow".

    Originally Posted by IMDESTROYER View Post

    and have notices that they have basically been replaced by by about and ehow
    It depends what you mean by "replaced". "About" and "Ehow" can never serve the purposes of an article directory, because it isn't permitted for publishers to go there and take content to re-publish, and that's the purpose of article directories and the reason for their existence.

    As an almost-daily user of Ezine Articles, the last thing I'd ever want would be for a potential customer to put a keyword from one of my articles into a search engine and find the EZA copy of one of my articles ranking on the first page. That would be very bad news for me. I obviously want them to find the copy on my own website so that I don't lose most of that traffic. (Of course, that's easy enough to arrange, thanks partly to that nice Panda). I want publishers to find the EZA copy. And sometimes they do (but not by looking in Google: being publishers, they already know where to look!).

    Originally Posted by IMDESTROYER View Post

    one thing i did notice was the user friendly layout and how well ehow and about is visually appealing and informative compared to squidoo and ezine, wherein ezine is just way too much reading and information overload with nothing to compensate the titles of the articles.
    I agree with all that, but given their radically different purposes and intended readership, I think it isn't such a surprise, perhaps?

    Originally Posted by IMDESTROYER View Post

    Does anyone know where i can find an analysis to these companies failures. 3/5 years ago when i searched something ezone and squidoo were always the ones to pop up and now its always about, wikipedia and ehow.
    Ah, you're defining "failure" according to "how they rank in Google"?! That's perhaps not very appropriate for article directories? The people who are putting articles in places like Ezine Articles don't want them to rank well at all (apart from the people who misunderstand what they're doing). Article marketers were helped by the Panda update decimating the SEO potential of article directories, as so many of us have been explaining here for a couple of years.

    Of course the exact opposite is the case with "Web 2.0 sites" like Squidoo. Their "failure" (and in their case I think we can all agree that they've failed, and failed badly) was caused by a huge Google slap.

    Ironically, although sites like Squidoo and sites like Ezine Articles serve totally different purposes for their users, one of the things that they have in common is that a significant proportion of their users are actually misusing them by trying to get benefits from them which those sites were never able or intended to provide, and there's much misunderstanding about each.

    This thread might interest you, regarding what places like Ezine Articles are actually for, and what benefits they can (and can't!) provide: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5068872

    And this one might interest you, about Squidoo's disaster: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post8109462
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    • Profile picture of the author IMDESTROYER
      Banned
      i was thinking in the context of daily usage "I want an answer now and i'm not willing to spend more than 3M looking for it". this morning i had a carton of eggs in my fridge and realized they were in their for a while, so the first thing i did was grab my tablet and search "how long do eggs last in the fridge" - i actually got the answer from a solo site dedicated to eggs but i did see allot of yahoo answers and an e-how.

      Conceptually speaking in this context, when promoting information i saw nothing but "how long do eggs last in the fridge" before if i searched this, i would get the article and somewhere on that article would be a promotion of other articles such as "great egg breakfast recipes" i didn't see any of this.


      Thanks for the links - do you know where i can get like web statistics and some charts and a timeline analysis of that market (not eggs but "sites that host articles") and their performance over the years.


      has anyone even invented this yet?
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      • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
        Banned
        Originally Posted by IMDESTROYER View Post

        do you know where i can get like web statistics and some charts and a timeline analysis of that market (not eggs but "sites that host articles") and their performance over the years.
        I don't know exactly what you're looking for, how "performance" would be defined and monitored, and how or on what basis it would be possible meaningfully to compare sites with such radically different business models, purposes, functions and traffic as the examples you've mentioned - sorry.

        Again, article directories are totally different from Squidoo, About.com and Ehow. They have completely different users, exist for entirely different reasons, and so on.

        Originally Posted by IMDESTROYER View Post

        has anyone even invented this yet?
        I doubt it. I don't immediately see how it would be "invented", or for what purpose, but to be honest I don't understand exactly what you mean by "this".

        Clearly rankings and traffic aren't a meaningful way of measuring their "performance", in any case (and the only reliable way to know a site's traffic is from its server logs, anyway).

        You refer to "that market", but there is no "that market" in any meaningful sense.

        They're totally different markets.

        Ezine Article has, undoubtedly, been absolutely hammered by Google, with the Panda updates (even by their own admission, at some length, on the company's blog), but those actually helped the site's author-users. That illustrates the fact that there is, in a sense, an intrinsic conflict between the objectives of an article directory and those of its authors: Ezine Articles clearly makes most of its own living out of the AdSense clicks of all the visitors there who don't reach our websites.

        Please don't think me impolite, but I really think that it might help you to define (even if only to yourself!) a little more clearly exactly what information you're looking for, and what it might potentially reveal, if you start from an appreciation of what an article directory is, why it exists, how it works, whose purposes it serves, who uses it and what benefits it can provide. Sorry to go on about it, but I was rather taken aback at someone imagining that Squidoo might be an "article directory"!
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  • Profile picture of the author lowelly
    I don't agree with the idea of a fall of Ezinearticles. I've been using it heavily to promote my site and I actually get more traffic than before.
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    • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
      Banned
      Originally Posted by lowelly View Post

      I don't agree with the idea of a fall of Ezinearticles.
      These things are subjective!

      They certainly thought it was a fall, and said so very openly. To me, as an EZA author, and to many others like me who have been saying so, here, for a couple of years, it was actually very helpful!

      But for all the reasons explained and exemplified in this post, clearly no article marketer would want potential customer traffic coming to their own site via an article directory. That would be very counter-productive, compared with the alternative. That isn't how article directories work.
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