Find more article marketing information at my brand new Article Marketing Blog!
EzineArticles vs. Everyone Else
Posted 10th October 2008 at 06:49 AM by Allen Graves
I have been watching articles and their habits in the search engines for years. I have come to understand a lot about how the search engines rank article directory article pages as opposed to articles found on (authority and fly-by-night) websites. Yes, there is a difference.
Believe it or not, search engines (Google, at least) seem to have a totally different way of ranking articles on article directories. Of course I am not going to get into all that, but trust me, there is an obvious difference. Those who have a lot of experience in article marketing will back me up on that.
This difference has become even more profound in the last several weeks as it also seems that ownership of content is being discussed a lot more by the top search engine representatives at the SEO conventions and blogsites lately.
All that being said, I wanted to touch a little bit on whether or not it is the best to submit to EzineArticles or somewhere else.
A lot of you have already said to yourselves, "What the hell is he talking about?! Of course it's best to submit to EZA."
Well, that may or may not be the case. Here's why.
You submit a killer article to EZA. You get a bunch of initial traffic from EZA and within a couple of days your article is in the #1 - #5 spot in Google and you get a boost of highly targeted traffic. Cool right? RIGHT!
But suddenly you realize that your traffic from EZA has already slowed down. Hmmm. It makes sense because so many people submit to them that your article is quickly buried behind everyone else who is submitting to them.
Then, you start seeing your article slowly falling from that top spot. Some even simply disappear altogether, never to appear there again!
If you are a hard-core article marketer who submits an article or two (or more) every day, then this won't really be a problem because you have a contant stream of these articles gathering EZA traffic and search engine traffic. As one article begins to fade away, the next one has taken its place...giving you a steady stream of traffic from your efforts.
But if you are like most, who only submit an article once a week or even less oftem than that, your article has pretty much had its day and will slowly live out its life span on page 37 of the results.
If you have heard the stories of someone making $10,000 off a single article (there are several of those stories out there), you'll notice that those articles were in the top spot in Google for months on end...and they were not published on EZA. Most of them were on sites like ArticleGold or ArticlesBase. Those second tier article directories that quietly bring in tons of traffic for their authors.
Yes, EZA gets the quick strike traffic and sales...but then the thousands of articles they receive every day quickly overtake the older ones. But at the second tier directories, if you work it the right way, there is a much better chance of you getting your article in the top spot and STAYING there for a much longer time while you enjoy the traffic and sales that this provides.
It's up to you. Which way do you want to go? Comments are encouraged for friendly debate.
Respectfully,
Allen Graves
Believe it or not, search engines (Google, at least) seem to have a totally different way of ranking articles on article directories. Of course I am not going to get into all that, but trust me, there is an obvious difference. Those who have a lot of experience in article marketing will back me up on that.
This difference has become even more profound in the last several weeks as it also seems that ownership of content is being discussed a lot more by the top search engine representatives at the SEO conventions and blogsites lately.
All that being said, I wanted to touch a little bit on whether or not it is the best to submit to EzineArticles or somewhere else.
A lot of you have already said to yourselves, "What the hell is he talking about?! Of course it's best to submit to EZA."
Well, that may or may not be the case. Here's why.
You submit a killer article to EZA. You get a bunch of initial traffic from EZA and within a couple of days your article is in the #1 - #5 spot in Google and you get a boost of highly targeted traffic. Cool right? RIGHT!
But suddenly you realize that your traffic from EZA has already slowed down. Hmmm. It makes sense because so many people submit to them that your article is quickly buried behind everyone else who is submitting to them.
Then, you start seeing your article slowly falling from that top spot. Some even simply disappear altogether, never to appear there again!
If you are a hard-core article marketer who submits an article or two (or more) every day, then this won't really be a problem because you have a contant stream of these articles gathering EZA traffic and search engine traffic. As one article begins to fade away, the next one has taken its place...giving you a steady stream of traffic from your efforts.
But if you are like most, who only submit an article once a week or even less oftem than that, your article has pretty much had its day and will slowly live out its life span on page 37 of the results.
If you have heard the stories of someone making $10,000 off a single article (there are several of those stories out there), you'll notice that those articles were in the top spot in Google for months on end...and they were not published on EZA. Most of them were on sites like ArticleGold or ArticlesBase. Those second tier article directories that quietly bring in tons of traffic for their authors.
Yes, EZA gets the quick strike traffic and sales...but then the thousands of articles they receive every day quickly overtake the older ones. But at the second tier directories, if you work it the right way, there is a much better chance of you getting your article in the top spot and STAYING there for a much longer time while you enjoy the traffic and sales that this provides.
It's up to you. Which way do you want to go? Comments are encouraged for friendly debate.
Respectfully,
Allen Graves
Total Comments 6
Comments
-
I can't really compare EZA to everyone else as I mainly submit to EZA, but I don't agree that articles fall off the top spot that quickly. My best EZA article has been ranked no.1 on Google for over a year (fell to no.2 about 2 weeks ago) but has earned me well over $10,000 since I submitted it. Admittedly that particular articles success is a one off, but any article of mine that has made it to page 1 of Google has stayed there and earned me a nice residual income.Posted 10th October 2008 at 07:01 AM by Hamida Harland
-
I'm glad you responded with this info, Hamida. You do a very good job and get a lot of sales (I think). Without revealing your strategies, do you do more than just submit and watch or do you just let it ride without doing any extra work with the article?
ALPosted 10th October 2008 at 07:14 AM by Allen Graves - I've never done anything to the articles that reached page 1, I've been very lucky in that they've just stayed there.
I've been doing some social bookmarking recently on articles that got to lower page 1 or page 2 (to try to move them up the ranks) and I'm experimenting with submitting my Rss feeds to directories like Feedage as well. It seems to be working, and if any of my page 1 articles fell off page 1 (and they were moneymakers) I'd do my utmost to get them back there.Posted 10th October 2008 at 10:07 AM by Hamida Harland - This makes sense to me and I'm very interested in your thoughts - I've been tracking some of my articles in very competitive niches on EZA.
They are initially on page 1 and then gradually drift down unless I intervene - but sometimes it's just easier to write another article to get on page 1.
The bit I don't understand is that as my article drifts down it is actually pushed down by newer articles with much less ranking potential than mine for the same keywords.
In less competitive areas they will just stay in the same position.
I can keep traffic coming in but like you say I have to keep writing content it almost seems like its quantity not quality. It doesn't seem quite right somehow.
NeilPosted 10th October 2008 at 02:34 PM by dotslash - I have articles out there, not in EZA that I have marketed and promoted. They have been on the first page of Google, Yahoo AND MSN for months now...and for pretty good keywords. But my EZA submissions won't stay up that high for that long.
I am working my tail off to get to the bottom of it. But I've been so busy lately I haven't had the chance. That's why I wanted to bring it up here.
ALPosted 10th October 2008 at 02:50 PM by Allen Graves - AL
Interesting points. Last December I conducted a test. I took one article. I spun that article so that each new article was 30% different.
I wanted to see if a spun article would get ranked using different resources. I used the same title and posted on ezine articles, go articles, article dashboard and I created a Hub. All pointed back to my content site.
For the first few months, EAs was 1st page, no.2, the hub was no. 8 and Article dashboard and Go articles were both on the 2nd page.
The test proved a point to me that you can rank well spinning articles.
I have just checked and EAs is still no.2 Go articles is on the 2nd page, but the hub and article dashboard is no where.
You can see that in this scenario, EAs have stayed the course and provided long term exposure, whilst some of the others have not.
However, you can argue, that by using the directory mediums, I generated more traffic than by only using EAs alone.
The next test could be to compare the number of different hits the other directories generated, the time it took to spin and submit and compare this to simply using that time to submit more articles to EA.
Of course there are other factors, such as backlinks, people downloading my articles from other directories etc to factor in.
Personally, for now I concentrate on EA only. Occasionally I will use article post robot for a mass distribution but otherwise that's it.
It's a continual testing process to find what works best for the least amount of input.......
Cheers
JJPosted 11th October 2008 at 06:46 AM by
