Jan
2010
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.
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