Is EzineArtilcles DEAD? Maybe not but it could KILL your site...

Can I know more about google zoo update?

I haven't really had any problems with any of my sites sporting ezine links. I think for the most part, people are getting done because they're linking to rubbish MFA sites. Usually these people have followed a course or WSO they found telling them to write 5 articles for the website, install a specific theme with a specific layout, and then write 1 article a week on ezine.

I don't think the Ezine articles hurt the site.

If it's good, unique, relevant content (on EZine) pointing to good, original, relevant content (your site) then surely that's not a bad thing and won't harm your rankings.

There are many factors at play here. To say that because article directories that got hit, -Google will automatically penalize all sites who made use of their sites is ridiculous.

I don't use Ezine anymore either to be honest, but there are people out there still driving quite a bit of traffic from their old articles out there. As for the SEO side of things, that all depends on quality, originality and relevancy of both the Ezine article and the site that the outgoing link points to (i said that already, didn't I).

It also depends on whether you have 100 Ezine articles, -great or not, using the same anchor texts for all. Too many factors at play, so not gonna go into detail.

If you know what you're doing, article networks can still be of benefit. Not as great as they used to be, that much is true, but not completely useless as some people would want you believe

There is no way Ezinearticles affected your rankings. They may have lost a ton of visitors after Panda, but I wouldn’t say they were penalized either. They just had tons of advertising fluff and low quality content devalued. Just like thousands of other websites that were not article directories. Still say there worth submitting an article to, even for SEO purposes. Granted their may be some article directories that are worthless but Ezine is not one of them...

They dont even come up in SERPS anymore, so I'd say most Ezine content has been completely devalued. No penalty, its just not passing any juice.

A few years ago I installed the EZA wordpress plugin (the plugin created by EZA) that would feed articles from your blog straight to your EZA account. This created duplicate content. I suspect this has caused a negative impact on my blog. I've been too lazy to remove all the articles because I will need to replace each article with a fresh one on my blog.

Have you used the EZA plugin? SOURCE: Submit Your Articles Directly from WordPress

There really isn't a reason to be worrying about EZA - you should be worrying if you SAPE right now.

Google has been fighting content farms since the beginning.

Why?

Google makes money with advertising.

The only content farm that does well in google is WIKIPEDIA...

Why?

no ads.

I don't think EzineArticles would hurt your rankings. I set-up a review website about 3 months ago, submitted articles to 3 directories including Ezine Articles and I ranked first when the product launched.

Ezine Articles still has a high PR on their root domain so I cannot imagine that Google would slap your website if you linked to them.

If you have hundreds of articles pointing to one web link that is mostly duplicate content from your website, then there might be a chance you have some issues. However, I think it is a link that boosts authority (maybe not TOO much) rather than hurts it.

Leiif, great work keeping this thread on track. Are you exploring data outside of WF? Seems the data is limited, not sure why.

EzineArticles.com isn't dead. The crappy content posted on it is.

PR6 tells me Google is still in love with it.

For me it depends what you mean by "Hit" - when you say "HIT" are you meaning completely deindexed, or do you mean dropped in position?

There's a difference at least in my head (which is pretty much empty so I may well be wrong!) between being "penalized" - and simply dropping back down the serps to where it would be if it wasn't initially pushed up the serps by juice which no longer flows.

"Penalized" implies punishment. If a site is de-indexed, then yes it's fair to say it's been penalized, but I see a lot of people saying their website has been penalized, when they just haven't.

Lets say there's site A & site B, and it's 2008 or something...and they're both very similar in most regards apart from the fact that site A is benefiting from link building from methods which Google don't want to reward but haven't yet found a way to weed out, and site B is focusing on onpage instead of offpage, so site B's real value is continually improving, while site A's is not, but site A's offpage is constantly being improved instead with backlinks using various methods.

Site B only benefits from onpage, while site A climbs due to the linkjuice flowing to it.

Site B is actually the site that is being penalized here, because it's actual value is improving constantly, and site A and other sites like it, are able to soar above it in the serps with websites which are of far less actual value to the visitor.

Lets say that site B gets a handful of real backlinks due to great content and features (real as in the actual kind of backlinks that Google intended to class as a sign of value), but it's only a handful, and site A has WAY more links, but actually doesn't have a single backlink that did not come from backlinking methods, meaning that none of site A's links are a sign of value.

But then fast forward a few years, and Google have improved their "stuff" (I can't spell algorithms), so they can now weed out all of the links that they class as being to do with "link schemes" of any kind - and now, the juice that was keeping site A way up the serps in comparison with site B, stops, and site A drops down the serps beyond site B - right where it would have been all along if it weren't for the fact that certain methods of backlinking created link juice which previously pushed it up to an artificially high position (artificial meaning that these kinds of links do not actually say anything about the value of the website, and there's no real world reason that these links should actually cause Google to class site A as more valuable than site B) .

In the above example - you can't class this as being "hit" or "penalised" - in fact, it was site B that was actually being penalised by Google allowing a website which is actually showing less true signs of value, to rise up the serps above it based on the extra perceived value that these backlinks create, which is only perceived value and not actual value.

It's just the balance being re adjusted...

I Think one issue people may have with their old articles on EZA is the overuse of the same keyword in their resource box. But this can easily be fixed, you can go back and edit the link and keyword so you dont have a high usage of the same exact keyword.

I was using ezine articles for years and had a drop in traffic last year and when I stopped using them my traffic shot back up.

I have found that now my seo costs are down and I am getting much better results and my alexa ranks are at the highest they have ever been at.