I hate to break it to you, but you aren't getting a PR6 link. If you check it, the link your article appears on is a PR0, at least to start. The same as any other brand new web page.

EZA's home page may be a PR6, but any juice from that is diluted to hundreds or thousands of lower level pages.

true. if you submit a good article it still gives you traffic, if not then there's still the link juice. still applicable from my point of view.

So agree with Alexa.

Internet Marketers always seem to believe all traffic has to come from Google.

Ezine articles/article directories are a great way of getting your content out there without coming directly from Google. You may not get major traffic directly, but when you write good stuff and people republish it, then not only are you creating alternative sources of traffic but you are exponetially expanding the readers of your content and the likeihood of more people clicking back to your site.

I see the 'article views' count as not just how many times people found it on Google, but also as an indication of what content other webmasters have been searching for, possibly to reproduce. (Gives me an idea of topics which will help get me out there even more)

It offers you an alternative way to get your content out there, all with redirects back to your site.

I see. I did get a big rank increase once from when I had 25 articles written and submitted to there - so there must be some SEO benefit from the links u get from there.

Hi Interesting tips on why to use Eza. I have written a few articles there and they have helped build credibility. I also love scribd for same reason...
thanks,
toneemarie

It is for me, yes. (But it doesn't take me a lot of time at all: I have two standard emails ready written, and all I do is "fill in a couple of blanks" and send them out as and when needed).

My primary objective is to get my resource box added to what's been published, not to get the content removed (that's very easy, but something I want to do only if I fail with the first email).

EZA has no such requirement, and never has.

After Google's "Panda update" a few months ago, they announced on their blog that - for the first time - they were considering instituting such a requirement, but then a couple of days later they (very wisely) announced that they'd decided not to. (They would have lost many - perhaps most - of their best authors over it).

Article directories don't require previously unpublished content at all - that's just an urban myth of internet marketing.

Like countless other article marketers, I have over 1,300 articles in EZA (and many of them are in other directories, too), all of which had previously been published in identical form on my own websites first.

This helpful, detailed thread explains the importance of not giving article directories previously unpublished articles.

In the introductory email series EZA send out to new authors, they specifically request the submission of articles previously published on the authors' own sites/blogs.

There's almost always one on their blog/site. And if not, just sending it to "admin" and "info" and "support" at theirdomain.com covers it.

Buzzle allows no external links at all, so it has no value to article marketing. (Recent development there - changed only a few weeks ago, I think).

well yes and no. In my sledgehammer approach my overseas employee writes about 20 articles a week for ezine and 99% get through, most of which isnt top quality.

however now that I am switching my article mrketing strategy (thanks to this thread) I will have her doing something else like blog commenting

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Just the 642 posts ...

And to be honest, half of them are nonsense, with people who haven't read the thread at all repeating all sorts of urban myths, but it becomes pretty clear, reading it, who knows what they're talking about and is actually making a living, I think?

This is absolutely right.

It might have been this thread? That's a pretty good, brief explanation of the subject, although even there one has to be able to identify and ignore the people who have misunderstood what the words mean.

"Duplicate content" (as opposed to "syndicated content"), as Google uses the words, and in the sense in which they're significant to internet marketers, refers to multiple copies of the same text on one website. But so many people wrongly use the words to refer to multiple submissions of the same articles to different article directories that many of the conversations on the subject become frankly unmanageable, with so many people talking at cross-purposes. :rolleyes:

After it's been indexed on my site, yes. (That's normally well within 24 hours).

With apologies, I can't, Johnny, because I don't disclose my niches, and even the templates will give that away to people who've received the emails from one of my many niche pen-names (some have been Warriors!).

But I can summarise/paraphrase their contents:-

First email: Hi, it looks like your webmaster's mistakenly left the resource-box off my article <title here> when re-publishing it from <source here>. The resource box is shown below, and I'd be really grateful if you'd please be kind enough to append it to the article, pronto, with the link(s) in clickable format, as per the terms of service of <source directory> from which you've kindly re-published it. I also have similarly written articles on <related subject> including one which won a Pulitzer prize and had the critics collapsed in hysteria, and if you'd like me to send copies of those for republication, with links intact, please let me know and they'll be on their way - no charge. Looking forward very much to seeing my link reinstated promptly, please ... best wishes and good luck with your site ..." etc. etc.

And if that doesn't get me anywhere, then after 7 days ...

Second email: this is just a standard DMCA notice (they're available everywhere, including in several threads here), written to the site-owner, with a copy to his registrar (found from a "whois"), his host (found from "who-hosts.com") and Google. That gets either the content or his site removed really quickly. Usually. Unless they're using "bulletproof hosting in Nepal" or something (but very few people are, and even they don't want Google delisting them, so they tend to take it seriously).

I completely agree with Domainorama, that you have to keep your pen-names and your whisk(e)y straight. Clearly if you publish an article under the name Alouicious Ponsonby-Smythe on your own site, and then submit it to EZA under the pen-name Arabella Parsnip-Swede, they're going to wonder whether you've stolen it, and reject it while they're wondering. This is what some people have done, who occasionally pop up here and say "EZA rejected an article because I'd already published it on my own site". Of course, what's really happened is that EZA rejected it because the names didn't match. :rolleyes:

A little while back, I was playing with the numbers, and posted some here.

Quick summary...

I took a sample of 15 of my oldest EZA articles from 2005, before I'd really honed a strategy. The resource boxes weren't all that good or all that bad.

The long-term clickthrough rate was about 1.1%. The syndication rate, estimated conservatively by taking the number of times the republish link was clicked, was 3.6%.

These 15 articles covered 6 different niches. Average length was about 850 words, while the best one in terms of syndication was almost 1,500. [Edit: the best one did better than the rest combined.]

Needless to say, these are not my best, either in terms of content or performance, just some of my oldest.

EZA are always the first directory I submit to.

However, I am starting to find that they are taking themselves a bit seriously by refusing articles just for the sake of it.

They tend to start to refuse some articles if I submit groups of them, which is what I tend to do as I save time by submitting my articles on the same day of the week.

When I look at my earlier articles, they actually let slip a few typos and yet later on refuse articles of higher quality, free of mistakes for some obscure reason they they can't explain.

Maybe they have a big head with being the number one article directory. But like Google, you should consider them and bend to their rules.

Looks like the poor dude's slowing down in his old age: he seems to be scoffing at only about 1/3rd the speed he used to. And all that salt looks to be making him a bit dry and fluffy round the edges, too.

I fear he won't be with us for much longer, at this rate.

Though nor will I, truth be told, because these threads are starting to give me the green apple splatters.

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As several have mentioned using EZA has nothing to do specifically for ranking. I still use EZA, but certainly never for the backlinks or even direct traffic. Through EZA, my articles find a new syndication source 2-3 times a week on average. In addition, self-syndication results in about 5 new context-relevant outlets every day. As I have often mentioned, all of my sites are in some of the most hotly competively niches, and have never ranked anywhere above the murky depths in the SERPs. Almost all traffic is driven directly by syndicated articles, and all search engines including Google are totally irrelevant in any of my marketing strategies.

I've sometimes found these.

They're breaching EZA's terms of service, of course (not that EZA will do anything about that), as well as your copyright (though they perhaps imagine - wrongly - that they're not, by including a link to the EZA copy), and you're completely within your rights to do something about them, if you want to.

I don't usually bother, myself. My impression is that something like my "first email" above is very likely to be ignored anyway, by people doing this, and I honestly don't feel sufficiently strongly about it to start sending them DMCA's. They're not actually doing me any harm, anyway. :confused:

For many of us, Google's "panda update" has made article marketing a better proposition than it used to be, not a worse one.

As you can see so many people commenting in so many threads here.

Removing so many of the article directory articles from the higher ranks of the SERP's has made it a bit easier for us to rank our own sites.

Your comment applies to "article directory marketing", I can see (and nobody can pretend that that's a great business model any more), but not to article marketing per se.

You are spot on with everything but this opening statement:

I think you have it backwards.

In the past, Google has said that linking to bad neighborhoods can cause lowered rankings, specifically noting link farms and spam sites. They have also said they don't penalize for inbound links from those types of sites for exactly the reason you later cited.

The webmaster or site owner can't control inbound links. If webmaster A could wipe out webmaster B's rankings by submitting B's site to the right number of bad sites, the only commercial site that would ever come up would be Google.

So they simply ignore those links unless, as you mentioned, they catch out the webmaster deliberately trying to inflate their ranking by buying links, etc.

Ooh, it's really difficult to compare the two, because ...

(i) Submitting quality articles to EZA in the hope of being syndicated shouldn't be anyone's sole way of trying to achieve syndication, and some of the success from article syndication is going to come from other efforts that go hand-in-hand with doing that;

(ii) Submitting quality articles to EZA in the hope of being syndicated is a little bit of a numbers game: you might have a couple of great articles that never get taken at all and a third, not-quite-so-good one which happens to spread far more, end up on an authority site or two and bring a flood of highly targeted traffic;

(iii) Submitting quality articles to EZA in the hope of being syndicated is something you can do whenever you feel like it, and without any restrictions at all, whereas blog commenting necessitates (a) identifying relevant blogs from which one fancies a backlink, and (b) getting one's comments accepted and published (not quite as predictable and reliable as it is at EZA!);

(iv) The answer will vary greatly according to how good someone is at "writing for syndication": I suspect - from what I see - that the overwhelming majority of EZA authors are, in any case, actually "writing for clicks" rather than "writing for syndication", i.e. they're trying to do article directory marketing rather than article marketing, and are depending on article directories for their own traffic and for their own backlinks, which is a big part of the reason why the turnover of article directory marketers is so high, with the majority (understandably) either dropping out in disillusionment or re-appearing 6 months later to start a thread called "Article Marketing Doesn't Work Any More" - you must have seen a few dozen of those here? - because, of course, for them it didn't. This "skews the results of the comparison greatly". In other words, for many, "the hope of being syndicated" is very different from "the reality of being syndicated".

Anyway, my answer is "do both".

I just want to say a big thank you to Alexa for the excellent, excellent information in this thread. And, in fact, in the older thread you linked to... which I read. All of it.

I'm a long-time WF lurker, but not a total newbie. However, the primary place I've done my learning did, in fact, drill in the duplicate content myth. They did a really good job of it, too. These two threads have really given me a huge leap forward, an understanding of syndication, and how to work more efficiently and build my business. I've had all my questions answered about the role of submitting content to article directories post-Panda.

This is the year I'm making the change from a dabbler to someone pursuing a family-supporting income. Thanks for your help on the way!

Best,
Kim

Zachary, you look old enough to drive. Why don't you sell used cars?

I've asked her the same question I would love one!

As I was thinking about all of this last night and I have been contemplating how to go about promoting my existing site. I'm wondering if there's ever a reason that you would choose NOT to submit your content to article directories for syndication?

My current site has about 120 pages of solid content, and another 40-50 of tutorials for a specific music method book and user-generated questions and answers. About 1/3 of my pages are in the top 10 of Google just on the strength of the content and a couple backlinks (I've never worked at backlinking). I've submitted about 6 articles to EZA... all unique, not the content from my site. The whole 'duplicate content' idea that I'm emerging from had the companion idea that the content on my site is supposed to be my very best content, and should be nowhere but my site.

For some reason the thought of sending off my content to various places makes me queasy. I think it's years of the thought process I've labored under. I mean, the whole point is to build my traffic, my credibility as knowledgeable in my field, build backlinks, and in the end, build an income for my family. It makes sense that in order to do that, my content has to go further than my website, so I get more exposure.

Can anyone help me wrap my brain around this?

Thanks.
Kim

Thanks very much, Gary. I do need to just start experimenting and branching out. I will choose some of my more general pages and get them out there! Like many, I've made my share of mistakes and unprofitable niches and getting distracted by all things shiny and new. It's time to just do some serious work on content, marketing, and backlinks. Oh, and my first product, in the works.

Many thanks for your time and ideas!

Best,
Kim

Gary, glad it could it help. I noticed just now, however, that the Clickbank link for the book referenced by MYOB, who so generously offered the tip regarding the book, had an affiliate ID, which I'm assuming is his. If it is, I'm doubting he's hoping to pay the mortgage with any funds from the proceeds of potential sales, but still, I think it wasn't my place to add the Scribd tip. Sorry for that! I was all caught up in the moment though at not only being able to find the book, but also for such a good price!

A good companion to that book is the ebook Xfactor wrote last year. I thought it would be mostly about Adsense, but what it mostly did for me was reinforce, in a big way, the power of the best way to do content publishing, which is so thoughtfully and carefully laid out here by following the posts and the nice links within them of Alexa Smith. I haven't yet read much by MYOB, but that's on the to-do list.

Xfactor's ebook lays out the strategy through 240 pages of nothing but that and all of the backlinking strategies he has tried over the years and what he suggests today. It really is just all about adding value and common sense, but I need that to be reinforced. An excellent read for anyone interested in content publishing done right.

This simply isn't so, Shannon. It's an extremely poor-quality backlink.

Such poor quality that you'd need many tens of thousands of them to give you the link-juice equivalent to that from one backlink on a relevant authority site.

Like any article directory, it's a non-context-relevant, PR-0 (or even "page-rank not available") backlink, for heaven's sake: you can't get much lower quality than that.

EZA is (for many people) the very best article directory there is, but nobody's using it because of its backlinks.

It will do, clearly: it isn't an article directory.

Wouldn't we all? But it isn't an alternative to EZA, Rowanman. It isn't an article directory. Nobody's using article directories for their backlinks. Not successfully, anyway: that's not what they're there for at all.

I dare say. But of course it's a totally different business model altogether.

Yes, I have. I've only been building my business in its present form for about two and a half years, so I can't claim to have an enormous number of them from more than 2 years ago, but certainly some are still generating traffic. And many from 1.5 - 2 years ago are generating new traffic regularly.

Here's how I've written mine, if it helps.

One of the forum's most successful article marketers shares his techniques here.

Well then you'll be extremely disappointed to learn that you don't actually get a PR6 backlink by submitting to EZA, at all. EZA's homepage may be PR6; your newly created article pages are PR-n/a or PR0. Some of the PR from other pages will trickle through to your page, sure (not that you'll be able to estimate how much, since Google's public-facing PR values are very infrequently updated and are displayed only in whole numbers), but certainly not that much.

If EZA backlinks are working for you, then by all means continue to use them for that. But, again, let's be clear: they're not actually very powerful at all, and they're not PR6. And this is yet another myth that's been laid to rest countless times already.

As far as ezine is concerned why not publish on infobarrel, squidoo or hubpages instead. Your article can actually get a pr2,3 or even 4. Then you got a quality backlink and half the profits too. Seems no reason to publish on ezine ever. Am I wrong.

With Google focusing on quality content so much, I think Ezine articles will do quite well.

I found myself back there the other day, and will be focusing on them again.

The duplicate content thing did annoy me at first, but that was just my lazy side

Nice point Joe, best not to make your copy too salesy... it's all about quality and freshness these days.

Aww man! Thwarted at every turn! LOL

Good for us, you can still get it from her profile

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