The Google Farmer Update and EzineArticles
By now you have no doubt heard of the massive update that Google did to it’s algorithm and what impact it had on a lot of websites that previously (and for years I might add), have ranked well. You can see the massively large negative impact it had on a lot of websites at Sistrix but for ease of use, I’ve included their ranking table below.
As you can see from this list there were quite a few sites that are relatively well-known who suffered a huge ranking loss. But the site that I want to focus on is EzineArticles.com.
I have always been a big proponent of writing original articles for distribution – most notably at EzineArticles. They do bring me traffic and tend to get published on other sites around the web quite a bit. I’m no Shakespeare but think I can hold my own pretty well when it comes to talking and writing about the topics that I do.
So when I noticed the HUGE drop in traffic [YIKES!] that EzineArticles received, it made me wonder if I should still at least at this time, recommend them as a traffic source for you.
Well, there’s good news and bad news on this front. The good news is that EzineArticles has always been a good source of traffic for many people and as such, is still a recommendation by many online marketers – whether that recommendation is from 5 years ago or from 5 weeks ago. The fact is, EzineArticles still has plenty of people recommending them.
But, since their traffic has dropped so significantly the chances of you getting found within Google for your article at EzineArticles.com is now pretty much insignificant.
I actually wondered if maybe Google had made a mistake; after all, the algorithm changes are just computer programs. Yes, they’re written by the brightest of the bright but the program itself is still just a…well…program. While I can’t recall off of the top of my head exactly what the case was, I do seem to remember on one occasion or another of some sites getting caught in the crosshairs by mistake.
That said, I do believe that adding your articles to sites like EzineArticles is still a good idea, but at least at this point in time, the traffic that you will be getting will likely not be from the Google themselves.
I suggest that you take a look at your site logs and see how much of the traffic came directly from EzineArticles themselves and how much came from Google for the keyword you optimized your article for. This will likely be a deciding factor in whether or not you choose to keep contributing content to them.
I further suggest that you also take a look at the response from Chris Knight, owner of EzineArticles to see what his take is on the whole situation. It’s a fairly lengthy blog post but mainly from the over 400 comments that have already been made about their current situation.
All in all, it all comes down to traffic. You need to determine for yourself and on a site by site basis, how well those articles have worked for you.
On a related note, quite a while ago I posted about the EzineArticles WordPress Plugin which allowed you to post articles directly from your own WordPress blog to EzineArticles. At this point in time, they will no longer be allowing you to do so as noted in their blog post about Google’s algorithm update.
***** UPDATE 3/15/2011 *****
Shortly after I published this, Google’s Matt Cutts released a Google Webmaster Tools video about article marketing in general. While he didn’t specifically mention EzineArticles, he did specifically speak to article marketing directories. Here’s the video: