EzineArticles
EzineArticles is a website that accepts unpaid submissions from authors, in exchange for links to the authors' websites and visibility for their work. The site also allows web and Ezine publishers to freely republish articles from the site, subject to certain conditions. Editorial oversight, based on simple editorial guidelines, occurs as submissions are screened by human editors who work for the company. In December 2013, Alexa ranked the site 646 globally and 129 in India.[1]
History
The website was founded by Chris Knight and generates revenue primarily from advertising; although, it also offers a few premium services. The website neither charges nor pays for submissions on content syndication, and neither charges nor pays for articles to be republished.
EzineArticles was among the hardest hit websites by Google's major algorithm update in 2011, which hit all article directories. The site responded by becoming more selective, reducing submissions by 10%, reducing the amount of advertisements displayed on each page, and raising their minimum word count. The site considered adding nofollow tags to all links, but abandoned this idea after objections from users.
According to a 2011 review by one user who has published over 100 articles on the site, "Although I think that the editorial oversight is a bit weak for my tastes (too many low-quality articles slip through), I think the oversight is much stronger than at any other article directory."[2]
In 2012 numerous contributions on Internet-based discussion forums expressed skepticism about the ongoing viability of the website from a SEO perspective.[3]
On September 11th, 2014, EzineArticles changed all their links from "do follow" to "nofollow". In an announcement made on the company's blog, the team cited their decision to change all links nofollow as an experiment to see how it will affect their site's traffic.
Author Certificates
On September 17, the website launched a new concept to assist in authors showing their credibility. It was broken into three levels and was granted to authors when they proved themselves to be credible, submit work that did not need editing, and adhered to the EzineArticle Guidelines. The three levels Basic Expert, Platinum Expert, and Diamond Author Expert.
The Basic Expert is granted to anyone who submits an article that goes through the 4-level process to be accepted and submitted.
The Platinum Expert title is granted to authors who have submitted and had five articles published, with little to no submission rejections due to basic grammatical errors.
Diamond Author Expert is available to authors who have submitted five successful articles, have a 100% complete profile including no flaws in their description, a personal URL, a blog URL, FaceBook URL, FaceBook Fan Page URL, LinkedIn URL, Twitter URL, YouTube URL, Google+ URL, and Pinterest URL. Between the stringent and high expectations for this level, less than 1% of the almost 500,000 active contributors are at this level.
References
- ↑ "How popular is ezinearticles.com?". Alexa. Alexa Internet, Inc. December 2013. Retrieved 7 December 2013.
- ↑ http://cazort.net/topic/ezinearticles
- ↑ seamy82; BenJackson and pintara3 (25 June 2012). "From an SEO standpoint do Ezinearticles still work?". Warrior Forum. Internet Warriors. Retrieved 7 December 2013.