Article Marketing Post Panda & How 15 Top Article Directories Are Doing Today
I am regularly asked about the effectiveness of article marketing. It’s been a little over a year since the first Google Panda update in February 2011 when many sites took a major beating in keyword rankings.
While researching free SEO tools, I found a nice feature in SEMRush that allows you to see the number of keywords a site is ranking for over time. Using a graph that pulls information from the last four years, you can easily see if and when Panda updates hit the site. You can also tell if the site has since recovered their rankings.
The following are some of the top article directories and how they have fared in keyword rankings since the first Panda update. Note the spike around 3/2011 in the graph and everything thereafter.
Examiner
Alexa Global Rank: 806
PageRank: 8
Website: http://www.examiner.com/
Editorial Guidelines: http://www.examiner.com/assets/handbook/index.html
Squidoo
Alexa Global Rank: 209
PageRank: 7
Website: http://www.squidoo.com/
Editorial Guidelines: http://www.squidoo.com/originalitypact
HubPages
Alexa Global Rank: 293
PageRank: 6
Website: http://hubpages.com/
Editorial Guidelines: http://hubpages.com/faq/#what_is_allowed
EzineArticles
Alexa Global Rank: 314
PageRank: 6
Website: http://ezinearticles.com
Editorial Guidelines: http://ezinearticles.com/editorial-guidelines/
Article Alley
Alexa Global Rank: 7,508
PageRank: 5
Website: http://www.articlealley.com/
Editorial Guidelines: http://www.articlealley.com/guidelines.php
Go Articles
Alexa Global Rank: 2,660
PageRank: 3
Website: http://goarticles.com/
Editorial Guidelines: http://goarticles.com/author.html
Articlesbase
Alexa Global Rank: 1,321
PageRank: 6
Website: http://www.articlesbase.com/
Editorial Guidelines: http://www.articlesbase.com/editorial-guidelines
ArticleSnatch
Alexa Global Rank: 4,834
PageRank: 5
Website: http://www.articlesnatch.com/
Editorial Guidelines: http://www.articlesnatch.com/submitguidelines.php
Amazines
Alexa Global Rank: 6,336
PageRank: 4
Website: http://www.amazines.com/
Editorial Guidelines: http://www.amazines.com/Article-Submission-Guidelines.htm
Suite101
Alexa Global Rank: 3,802
PageRank: 6
Website: http://www.suite101.com/
Editorial Guidelines: http://community.suite101.com/support/suite101-submission-guidelines
Helium
Alexa Global Rank: 4,842
PageRank: 5
Website: http://www.helium.com/
Editorial Guidelines: http://help.helium.com/helium-writing-standards
Buzzle
Alexa Global Rank: 1,868
PageRank: 6
Website: http://www.buzzle.com/
Editorial Guidelines: http://www.buzzle.com/authors/become-author.asp
ArticleCity
Alexa Global Rank: 9,756
PageRank: 5
Website: http://www.articlecity.com/
Editorial Guidelines: http://www.articlecity.com/article_submission.php
Self Growth
Alexa Global Rank: 5,030
PageRank: 6
Website: http://www.selfgrowth.com/
Editorial Guidelines: http://www.selfgrowth.com/submit_articles
Bukisa
Alexa Global Rank: 7,681
PageRank: 5
Website: http://www.bukisa.com/
Editorial Guidelines: http://www.bukisa.com/info/bukisa-101
Do you use article marketing in your online marketing strategy? Has it been effective since Panda? What directories would you suggest?
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Hi Kristi, this is really interesting! I wonder why some sites bounced back while others are still stuck in the mud. Squidoo looks like the place to be right now. Thanks for providing a quick snapshot for easy comparison of all these sites.
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Have a great weekend Kristi.
Ileane recently posted..How To Track Traffic on YouTube with YouTube Analytics
I know a lot of sites changed their guidelines. HubPages changed their entire structure – articles are now on subdomains (username.hubpages.com/article-name vs. hubpages.com/article-name). And their the only ones that had a great recovery.
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Kristi Hines recently posted..28 Things You Need To Know About The New Facebook Pages
Thank Kristi, I found several fun and useful tool in Kissmetrics.
Glad to hear it Marbella!
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Kristi Hines recently posted..28 Things You Need To Know About The New Facebook Pages
I see hubpages talked about a lot, probably more than squidoo lately. I have always liked squidoo and it’s good to see it seems to be recovering. Looks like ezine has a bit to go yet, and is still taking a beating.
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Ray recently posted..So You Want to Claim the Top Spot in Google
Squidoo took the least hit out of all of them. They’ve always had higher standards than other sites though, so I’m not too surprised.
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Kristi Hines recently posted..28 Things You Need To Know About The New Facebook Pages
Hi Kristi,
Good to see these sites are recovering. Thanks for sharing the list.
Have a great weekend..!
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Dev recently posted..WPKube Is Now Powered By Thesis Theme Framework
Thanks Dev. You too!
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Kristi Hines recently posted..28 Things You Need To Know About The New Facebook Pages
Thanks for sharing and for obvious presentation of the rankings. Squidoo was my choice as well.
Lily Rose recently posted..Healthy Trim ingredients: what’s in those capsules?
You’re welcome Lily!
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Kristi Hines recently posted..6 Indispensable Free & Freemium SEO Tools
Thanks for sharing this infographics. This is a big factor to consider in business marketing. Your illustrations here are the best tip for us.
Everest recently posted..The best Diet solutions to supplement weight loss
You’re welcome Everest! Definitely important for businesses using article marketing to go with sites that are doing well in search!
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Kristi Hines recently posted..6 Indispensable Free & Freemium SEO Tools
If you have the funds, you could also consider outsourcing your daily tasks. That’s a huge time saver and you will have someone working your business for you even while you are at your main job.
Mirana recently posted..Chalet 1802
Lots of people outsource their article marketing writing. Good point!
Hey Kristi,
There has been a lot of debate about how effective article marketing is “post Panda”
I think regardless of whether or that a particular article directory has lost some of the search visibility is one thing, if you are counting on traffic from the articles themselves, but I think the links from those directories still hold some value, but perhaps not quite as much as before, but I don’t think this is reason to abandon article directories altogether.
Then again one shouldn’t be relying solely on article marketing as their source of links in the first place. A diversified approach to link building works best and this is nothing new of course.
I can tell you what doesn’t work, at least not nearly as effectively as it used to. That’s spinning content and blasting that to hundred or thousand of article directories. Google is getting better at filtering similar content. But that is generally a good thing.
I do find it interesting how some sites got hit and never recovered whereas others got hit and bounced back.
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Gerald Weber recently posted..When The Going Gets Tough, The Links Get Blamed
I look at rankings as a sign of how Google feels about a particular site. If the site is continuously gaining in the rankings, then Google must like them (and their links probably count for something) vs. sites that haven’t bounced back in rankings (and their links probably count for less).
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Kristi Hines recently posted..6 Indispensable Free & Freemium SEO Tools
I agree.
This won’t keep me from publishing articles on sites like Ezines for example, but you can bet I’m not going to put a lot of my time and energy there.
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Gerald Weber recently posted..When The Going Gets Tough, The Links Get Blamed
I think the biggest problem with most of these directories is that they support the whole “Article Marketing” approach that so many self-proclaimed SEO experts use, which is for link building. While it’s useful (the links), it’s not really providing much else, which is where these directories have failed. People simply spin content that passes copyscape, even if it doesn’t read well.
This provides absolutely no value to the reader and I’m glad to see Google doing their job. Article Marketing, in reality, is a great way to get targeted traffic. However, most people simply use it for the links, which is not very useful. If they took the time they spend on creating, spinning, and submitting this content to a ton of low quality directories, they’d be able to knock out some high value content that gets them HIGHLY targeted users, as well as more PR (which most shoot for in the first place) from those high PR properties.
It all just seems so backwards, yet these companies have allowed it and even continue to do so.
Wow, that’s an awesome comparison.
Squidoo is definitely one step ahead aren’t they.
I’ve also gotta say, thank you for reminding me how cool SEM Rush is. Sometimes you forget how many handy tools I’ve actually download and forget about.
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Hello Kristi,
I would like to express my appreciation regarding this article. It is very informative and helpful, regarding importance of this kind of task. Thank you for sharing it!
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Hi Kristi, thanks for the information, love to see Squidoo and Hubpages on top
I’m still using Squidoo and Hubpages for article marketing …
Latief recently posted..Awesome Business Gadgets That Are In Demand
Very interesting how squidoo is still going strong. I used to use them all the time for linking and SEO purposes. Interesting how the article pages took a fall. Now the question is with them taking a fall does google not see the links as important. Of course the reason the articles took a dive was cause of all the duplicate content.
In your opinion is it worth submitting to article places still I am going towards the way of guest blogging.
I run a reputation management site and the articles help slightly for links with that business.
Curious what everyones best way to get links are. I use directories and guest blogging.
One more thing before i go I see someone suggesting outsourcing the linking process. I think this is a good idea as long as they do not write the posts.
Staurt recently posted..SEO West Palm Beach| West Palm Beach Internet Marketing | Palm Beach Search Engine Optimization
Wow–extremely useful information. I was actually just doing a little research on article marketing and what links count for these days. I kind of figured ezine was still doing poorly, as the general quality of articles is pretty crappy. I honestly can post an article on there from scratch in about 3-5 minutes. How could it be “quality” content?
That’s crazy that Squidoo out of all these sites is the one to rebound best. I did notice that they have some pretty strict guidelines as to what makes a “lens” qualified to not only be indexed but have followed links as well. I think this definitely helps with the quality and original content signals.
Nicholas recently posted..Steps To Becoming A Lawyer
This is just another example of why you shouldn’t rely on just one method and one source for SEO. I don’t think this information should deter anyone from ever using article marketing, but just like everything, use sparingly. Thanks for the wonderful graphs and introducing me to such a wonderful new tool – SEM Rush.
Full Media recently posted..Affordable Web Design Company
I am still a big supporter in article marketing…some SEOs now a days write it off because it isn’t AS efficient as it once was…but in my opinion, it is still an incredibly useful way to build links and get direct traffic. Also, a great thing about some of those such as Hubpages, Squidoo, GoArticles, etc. is they do not have a review period so it takes very little effort to build high quality links that are indexed almost immediately. Great write up, and I’ll be sharing this on Twitter!
Mike recently posted..Website Essentials: You Must Have These
These directories helping so many of internet promoters, its quite interesting to know about their trends in their stats. Every webmasters dream to reach such a position. Fortune is opened by their efforts.
I was kind of looking for a comparison chart with more details. Has article marketing died? Is it better than guest blogging?
There are so many doubts and questions in my mind that need to be cleared after the recent panda update
Ricky recently posted..Most Complete Calculator App for Windows Phone Fans: Supports Scientific, Programmer, Currency and Unit Converter
Wow! This is a real eye opener. I pay to have my articles submitted to a number of those sites. Do you think it is worth it to have articles posted to Ezine, Amazine and the others or just focus on getting hubs and lenses?
Wow is right— I knew they had real issues, but I never dreamed it was this bad. This would explain why I have so many clients asking for guest posts:)
Becky— I’m sure Kristy will answer you when she gets this far down on the page– but I think you might be better off investing your time or money on good quality guest posts on blogs that are related to your niche. Just be careful of “junk blogs”— after a while, you will know them at a glance–they are the ones that have crazy high Page Ranks and nothing but garbage on their pages. A sure sign is if there are just two pages—Home and Disclosure.
Squidoo looks like it’s doing great, and the rest of the article directories still get tons of traffic. I just wanted make it my primary source for marketing.
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DeniseGabbard recently posted..Monday Motivation: Successful Writer with Dogged Determination
Interesting to see how some of these sites recovered quite well after Panda and others are still struggling, I thought that EzineArticles had recovered, specially after all the editorial guidelines “enhancements” which sometimes are a pain on the back side. But IMO they still got too many ads on individual article’s pages.
[...] number of times (for me that was 50+). After reading this rather useful post by Kristi Hines on what effect Panda has had on article site traffic, it seemed silly not [...]
Very cool to see that data side by side. I think that sites which incorporate some type of peer rating system will do very well in the future. Can’t tell if google incorporates that data into the algorithm, but it seems sites like squidoo and hubpages, which both have it are doing great.
It makes sense since article directory editors have an incentive to get as much content on their site as possible so they often push through poor quality material whereas readers have no incentive to rate an article well so their opinion means more.
I’m guessing we’ll see the article directories dropping even more in the future so I’m going to try and find more community based sites to work on. The strong communities also drive comments and that’s likely a contributing factor in rating article quality.
Are you using many article directories yourself any more?
I was looking for an article just like this to determine how badly the article directories were affected and which ones were the best now available. Wow! They were really slammed! Thanks a bundle for the detailed charts!
Cheers,
Richard
Richard recently posted..SEO Over-Optimization Penalty
Its a big change after panda updates. Google actually warned webmasters that take care of your contents otherwise we know what we have to do….
This post was exactly what I was looking for. Thank you!
Kelsey recently posted..Makeover Monday
Really useful analysis. I’m just about to start writing a few articles and it’s good to find some useful information on article marketing post google updates.
Thank you!
scott recently posted..By: scott
Seeing the graphs is really mind blowing how hard some of these directories got hit, especially ezinearticles. You have any updated graphs post penguin?
Your Answers recently posted..3 Hot Online Money Making Ideas For You
I can tell you that a lot of the article directories I thought were hot are no longer. This graph really helps. Some of the big guns like Clush directory and Buzz are not even on here anymore. Many of my SEO friends were shocked at the Google Panda Update.
Frank recently posted..Women discover eyelashes Chicago
Very interesting data you have here. After using SEMrush myself, I was able to determine the exact time of when a algorithmic change occurred. Also, i like how you compared the data for various article marketing sites. It provides much insight into achieving high search rankings for the long run.
Dan Trimper recently posted..Internet Marketing SEO Tactics To Avoid
Very good data analysis – thank you.
Given that the time required to gain a link from an article directory is still small I still believe it has a place in a link building strategy although it should not be relied on by any means. The ease at which anchor texts can be chosen also appeals.
Great to see sites gradually bouncing back, nice tool btw too.
In my opinion for the most effective SEO you have to keep it varied and should not rely on one method anyway ie article writing.
Thanks for the info, was definitely worth the read
Dave recently posted..Alpine birds – wildlife in Chamonix
One thing I keep in mind on sites like ezinearticles is the other sites that pick up my articles from there and get links that way. Kind of old school but still amazed how many i see that still get picked up.
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Excellent article, I definitely bookmarked it. It’s interesting to see how article sites got crushed, we used to be able to get a lot more views and url clicks from articles pre Panda, however articles are still a great way of advertising, whether for direct traffic, SEO or both.
As this post shows, the key is posting high quality articles to directories and places that are really worth it
Hi,
thanks for the analysis. Do you have any update on how Article Directories’ traffic changed in 2012?
Cheers,
Norman
Thanks so much for the article marketing update. Like Norman, I’m wondering how the situation has developed since then – I have the feeling that EZA has recovered quite a bit. Has it?
I also appreciate that the key article directories have gotten a lot more selective and insist on a higher level of quality – which is good for those of us who focus on providing high quality articles.
Thanks again!
Elisabeth recently posted..Squidazon Review Part 5: Squidazon vs. Squid Pro Quo
How do I earn links with Squidoo? Is it just through the Authors Page? I have published several lens but not seen any of them indexed by Google.
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BD Williams recently posted..How To Prepare Your House For the Winter
I am regularly asked about the effectiveness of article marketing. It’s been a little over a year since the first Google Panda update in February 2011 when many sites took a major beating in keyword rankings. While researching free SEO tools, I found a nice feature in SEMRush that allows you to see the number of keywords a site is ranking for over time.
charansingh recently posted..Industrial Live Project Training
Well after new update I think the article which was copy past or the content of the article was more then 60% copied was hit by panda as this is something I think more better for all those who are writing perfect and unique content for there blogs and articles also the quality work is now being start with out spamming any site.
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