Is Ezine that much better?

Not so at all, unfortunately.

As even EZA's owner has been openly commenting for several months.

Like every article published in every article directory, regardless of the page-rank of its own home page, you'll get a non-context-relevant, PR-0 backlink out of it. How could it be otherwise? Nobody is born with an understanding of article marketing, and no new web-page is born with any page rank.

That's the PR of their own home page. That isn't where your articles are published. Websites don't "have page rank". Pages have page rank.

Fortunately, this one also isn't true.

You wouldn't want to get your traffic from an article directory? When a potential customer finds one of your articles by putting one of its keywords into a search engine as his search terms (which is exactly what potential customers do), the last thing you want him to find is an article directory copy, because if he finds that copy then even with (say) a 30% click-through-rate from your article, you'll still lose the other 70% of the traffic, whereas if he finds the copy originally indexed and published on your own site, instead, you'll get 100% of that traffic. So as you can see, simple logic and arithmetic dictate that you wouldn't want your potential traffic going off to an article directory. Article directory copies are just for potential syndicators to find. They're for people who search in article directories (which customers don't), not for people who search in Google. This is why it's essential not to "write for clicks" or try to sell/promote in the articles, but to write for syndication instead.

Article directories are stepping stones. There's no point in trying to use them for their own traffic (which you wouldn't want, that way, as you'd lose most of it) or for their own backlinks (which are only non-context-relevant PR-0 backlinks). And that isn't (and never was) what article directories are there for at all, of course. Many people do try to use them that way, but those are all the people who end up six months later starting off all the threads you can find in this and other forums with titles like "Article Marketing Is Dead" (imagining, typically, that what they've been doing was actually "article marketing"!).

I can hardly believe some of the misinformation "down here" about article marketing, in contrast to all the threads on the subject in the "Main Marketing Forum".

In case a few threads covering the (widely misunderstood!) basics of article marketing are helpful to anyone ...

This very good but very long thread explains in detail why it's so important to publish articles on your own site first, before submitting them anywhere else (and a lot of the indicental chat in it touches on other "basic article marketing questions").

This one explains a lot of stuff about "spinning", and what you really need to know about it.

This one explains why it's seriously bad news to create backlinks to article directories.

This one explains a bit more about article directories and writing for syndication.

This one is about "unique content" and a bit about link-juice.

This one is about writing for syndication. And this one covers all the basics of article marketing by syndication.

And in this excellent little article an expert writer/marketer explains to perfection the reality of "duplicate content".

Terrible advice...

Why would I want to submit my article to a site where they only want unique content? I would rather submit my article to my own site first.

Ezinearticles is great because this is where other people go to get syndicated content, and that means you can get various links to your site from people who syndicate your content on their sites.

This doesn't happen with most of the thousands of other article directories. Most backlinks from these other article directories don't show up in Yahoo site explorer or other tools that show backlinks to a domain.

Yes...Ezine is that much better than most of the other directories.

The only reason to submit a spun article to thousands of other directories is for backlinks. No one ever reads those articles in the junk directories.

To get dofollow links from hubpages, you need to maintain the hub score or your profile score. score should be 75+, else all the links will get nofollow. Which I think is not sustainable, if you doing it for the purpose of link building. You can get high popularity though, for this you need high quality and regular blogging..