How come my article is indexed but not ranking?

How long ago was it indexed?

Which article directory was it published on?

Brian

There could be a myriad of reasons for this.

A few questions to ask yourself (or to answer, if you'd like someone's input):

- How old is the article / how long has it been indexed? It's possible it simply hasn't had enough time--despite already being indexed--to be subjected to Googles ranking algorithm.

- Maybe the competition for that keyword phrase isn't as weak as you believe? (although 9 words is very long, even by long-tail standards; it'd be very surprising if the competition was really strong)

- What's your keyword density of the article? If you've been over-eager, and included it too many times, Google might well be looking upon the article as spam and be limiting/penalising its ranking due to keyword stuffing.

- On what site(s) is the article published? If its an article directory like EZA, you can probably ignore this. If it's another site (including one of your own), it's possible Google is penalising your rankings across the entire domain, due to shady on-site SEO practices, or what not.

I know this doesn't answer your question, but there's a few things to consider which might well lead to your discovering why it's not ranking. Most likely you just need to wait a bit longer (and perhaps build some backlinks to your article page in the mean time).

Index and ranking are different, Google indexes everything but only ranks good stuff that is unique.