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For a long time, I had this comparison in my mind, but until now, I failed to write it down due lack time. Finally, I have found that one hour that will help me (and hopefully, you) to see what is the deal with article directories, especially the 3 giants in the business right now, EzineArticle, ArticlesBase and Goarticles.

I am a man that likes to go straight to the point, so I will start right now by stating that these type of sites aren’t really that useful to common people, at least not in the same way as they are to webmasters. Let us face it, webmasters need to promote their sites, that is why they write 500 words low quality articles and submit them to article directories. In the beginning at least, maybe they were worthing something. But now, if we search i.e. “yeast infection treatment” (which is in fact a small simple niche, there is not much to say about this except what people should really know), we can find aprox. 46300 articles about this in EzineArticles.com, over 2300 matching entries in GoArticles.com and over 1000 in ArticlesBase.com. This kind of exaggerating, of “overwriting” is not useful nor to normal people, nor to needy people, nor to anybody else except search engines. This means that the hole writing process that gravitates around these types of sites is purely artificial. In my opinion, it doesn’t really matter if your content is unique by Copyscape, if you are saying the same thing 10000 times, but with lexical changes. Google self-declared a never-ending war to spam, but my question is why doesn’t Google see spam in these kind of sites? And my question seems legit, because in almost any query on Google these days, one can see, in not on the first page, then on the second or third, an article from these directories.

And webmasters get even worse. I.e. check this clever spam. If we search Google after “acai berry”, we get on first page, result number 2:

goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=1829429

and result number 3:

ezinearticles.com/?Acai-Berry—How-to-Lose-Weight-With-Acai-Berry&id=2852384

Any normal man would ask, why these particular articles? There must be thousands of articles on “acai berry” niche in both Goarticles and EzineArticles. Why these 2? The answer is again very simple: SPAM. The GoArticles acai berry articles is linked, according to Yahoo link explorer, from 22,000 backlinks. It was submitted 6 months ago. And it has a bunch of affiliate links all over it. If you call this natural, I will cut my b..s. The EzineArticles acai berry article has over 4000 links. Most come from .ru sites, according to the same Yahoo Explorer. So “Google”, if you’re reading this, please answer me, WHY?

Now, to get back to the comparison:

Alexa

EA - 131

AB - 435

GA - 1600

PR

EA - 6
AB - 6
GA -6

Submission time

EA - 4-5 days
AB - 1-2 dyas
GA - 1 day
Approval rate

EA - Has some editorial process

AB - Almost no editorial process
GA -Almost no editorial process

Age

EA - Oldest

AB - Newest
GA -In between

Thanks for reading.

All you webmasters, Google, Yahoo and other SE spam teams, hackers and last but not least, spammers out there, pay attention, I have this very last Christmas gift for you. Continuing my last post about content hosting communities, I am going show you how to get a hi5 reference, then I will show some other “nice” places to spam your links and last but not least, I will point some “great directories”.

If you didn’t knew, one can have a medication group on hi5: hi5.com /friend/group/3582088–Cialis-Professional–front-html . “Cialis Professional” - nice, huh? I mean, this group be intense in many aspects, much better then Cialis Amateur

How about this Vibracin community hosted on Galeon, galeon.com /dinya/vibramycin/vibramycin-dose.html , a PR 7 community which also loves spam ?

These 2 look also promising:

changa .extra.hu /vibramycin/vibramycin-dosage.html

atoato .happyhost.org /inderal/what-is-inderal.html

Notice that although these 2 are image hosting communities, somehow the “hosting guys” managed to put some good indexed text over there.

Now, on directories. First, a joke: riyi .net (check this for spam reference: riyi .net/ index.php?c=211&p=16 )

Particularly, the first page words are amusing:  “Choose Vivid Directory Today!” 

Now, to get more serious. Here is a directory which is on 2900 Alexa, with PR7 and more. This directory recommend itself as a Singapore travel guide, providing business listings for businesses in Singapore. So far, great. But things get a little messy when you can read about Genital warts symptoms (streetdirectory .com /travel_guide/111133/stds/genital_warts_symptoms.html) at the medical section. My question here is why the heck need travelers this kind of information? Better yet, why does Google offer rankings for this site on all second and third query pages, for most relevant keywords SEOed by this directory? Why should Singapore travelers need to read about how to treat face eczema or how to diagnose Alzheimer disease? Why should the rest of the world need to read those type of things from a non-relevant site, when clicking on the 2nd page G query results?

Everything is changing and domains make no exception. Here is a glimpse: beacon - directory .com is now a blog with the title “Russian Women marriage agency”. Wow, nice going!

Hope I got some tears or smiles from you.

I this post I will not make a review of the common content hosting sites, I will just list some of them which I my opinion represent spam and should not be even listed in Google queries. As I love to search things on Google it’s only normal I find these things from time to time. Maybe some guys from Google spam team should read this.

Let’s type “Cymbalta medication” on Google. I even made a pic with some results from page 2:

You see the results from adobe? Wow. Of course, clicking on it takes us to a 404, but still Google had time to index this page and gave it a lot of weight. And then, there are others.

That Larry thing blog, on an edu. So much for the phrase: “Edu’s are just like regular types of tlds.” Also see how the title and the description resembles with the spam hosted on wp.mu? Talking about wp.mu, the link is actually a redirection to low quality online pharmacy which has only 3(three, yes, that is correct) pages indexed. How are guys from Wp.mu supporting this? But then again, who could check all the content on that site?

And, talking about hosted content, let’s take top 3. I am too lazzy to make another pic, but I am telling you the 3rd link is to an ezine article. Great, I have no problem. But wait, there are some many ezine articles on this subject, why this particular one? Well, Google doesn’t show, but as Yahoo shows, that particular article page from ezinearticles has a single back link from, wow, this spammy page:

rarcy.web.fc2.com/provigil/effects-medication-provigil-side          (just add .html after this)

Now that we are talking, fc2.com is another PR6 as they call it “Free Website Access Analysis Blog Rental Server SEO Countermeasures etc” . WOW.

So linking an ezine 500 words crappy article from a spammy place grants Juliet Cohen expert article writer from Ezine Articles (which, by the way, has over 600 articles written there) a better place then i.e. rxlist.com/cymbalta-drug.htm , a PR6 page from a site which is made by doctors and which deals professionally with medication. Again, WOW.

It think I should stop for today.

If one types “women” on Google and then clicks on images, interesting stuff appears on the screen. More than 30% of the pictures provided by Google as highly representative for this keyword are indecent. And this goes on to page 2, 3 and so on. I am not a SEO guru or something, but it is pretty obvious, by the way these sites look, that there are just a few scripts behind this “problem”. Now, call me a bigmouth, but I believe Google should filter these by default with Safesearch, feature which works pretty good by the way. I don’t really know how they built Safesearch (probably some skin detection algo’s together with some well adjusted filter). But what I mean is that naked women performing sexual activities should not be considered highly representative for keyword “women”, don’t you agree with me?

So, after I clicked on Safesearch, set it to Strict, and then browsed some images, I returned back to Google.com, but surprise, Safesearch was still on, filtering my queries. Interesting about this filter is the way it sorts results. I searched for example “yeast infection treatment” and the results were completely different than when I had Safesearch inactive. Mostly, results were less accurate, many sites which were clearly providing useful info on this terms where not even in the first 100, although, with Safesearch Off, some are even in top 5. Strange really.

Here is what Google has to say on Safesearch.

Here is Google’s Safesearchweb.com.

So, what gives?

I am writing this post at 3 a.m., drinking my cup of coffee, a little nervous on big players out there. I will now talk about a punctual case which is representative for a lot of search queries in SE, especially Google. Let’s discuss the query “hemorrhoids treatment“.

Now, looking at the results, we have:

1. Webmd’s 2 pages: “Treatment Overview” and “Home treatment”

2. Goarticles article named “Natural Hemorrhoids Treatment”

3. Emedicine section on Hemorrhoids

4. hemmorhoidstreatment .com

I will stop here as the next site which I consider very appropriate and highly representative for this search term is indeed on the 5th position. This site offers a forum, a newsletter, reviews of the main treatments online and so on. It’s age is more than 3 years and as you can see, all hemorrhoids topics are fully covered.

So let’s take these results that are in front of my representative site one by one.

Webmd’s articles on hemorrhoids.
Webmd’s content is provided by a company named Healthwise. Although the articles are appropriate for the keyterms “hemorrhoids treatment”, I strongly believe there are not worthy for the first and second place. Although the content is indeed written by professionals, it was last updated in 2006. Webmd is not specialized on this niche term, it has a general site on all sorts of diseases. The information is not enough for people that are for example looking to buy an immediate cure or that need advice from real persons. And why 2 pages from Webmd?? It almost seems like a Google favor to this company. It is clear that the 500 words on this disease can not compete with a real niche site specialized in offering information strictly on this health problem. Moreover, the content is served as over-optimized for search engine ranking. I see no value in this kind of content, and I would certainly NOT give this a first+second place.

Goarticles on hemorrhoids

This looks almost like a joke. A 500 words article written mostly for advertising purposes on a low quality article directory site is ranking right after Webmd. WOW. And more incredible, is ranking even though it was removed by the editors. The page is a customized 404, and still is ranking in front of credible sites which have something real to show to visitors.

Emedicine section on Hemorrhoids
WebMd must be a good money cow as Google gives the next position to another WebMd site. Same optimized for searches content, short and with huge lack of real helping information. One might as well type hemorrhoids on wiki and get much more information than what this site offers. Incredibly, this site offers though 4 (four) comments from “real” people. Comments like this one:
“I have been using the Preparation H wipes for my hemorrhoids and still the bleeding occurs, so I have an appointment with a specialist coming up soon.”
Helpful, huh?

hemmorhoidstreatment .com
Now this is a joke! Misspelling “hemorrhoids” and linking the site from 2 other low quality sites, hemroids .ws and hemoroids .info with identical content seems to be enough to jump in front of real sites. Again, I am amazed.

Examples like this, I can give a thousand. Overall, I am disappointed on what results are becoming today. Google should put more accent on niche sites that handle subjects better that big general sites, and also Google should reward hard work, age and quality instead of new questionable content from questionable sources.