Site forces quality changes for submitted articles.
One of the sites frequently mentioned as being targeted in Google’s recent quality crackdown is EzineArticles.com.
It should come as no surprise that today the site instituted new rules and checks for quality.
The site lets people submit articles that are free to reprint. The author gets a number of benefits, but backlinks are one of the biggest. As a result, many authors submit quick articles with little substance solely to get the backlink.
The new quality guidelines include increased quality checks, no article submission through the API and Wordpress Plugin (which was probably being abused), and a new 400 word count minimum (because longer garbage is better than short garbage.)
Will Google accept after-the-fact changes to site quality? My guess is it takes a while to change a reputation.
Joe says
Google tries to improve its algorithms while Bing leeches on to it.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html
RH says
Andrew great line “because longer garbage is better than short garbage”
Ken from Advanced Market Training says
I’d imagine this is going to be tough for people who’ve used automated article submitters, especially those who go through the API. However, you can check out one article submitter that has always, and will always get through.
It uses the submission form on over 800 article directories, and requires users to choose from the directory’s own category listing.
I won’t leave a link here, but if you click on my name, you’ll see the banner ads for it.
bernard says
“Cracks Down” doesn’t seems true: Alexa.com shows a few percent traffic drop at most. That won’t hurt their business significantly.
Andrew Allemann says
Bernard, 4.4% in 7 days seems like a lot to me
Andrew Allemann says
…on the other hand, eHow keeps going up
bernard says
I meant such a variation is certainly very far to the point where they may start to loose money.
With no cost for content acquisition, probably limited costs of operation, and their huge trafic (Alexa 100), they certainly have a very profit level.
Andrew Allemann says
@ bernard – gotcha, makes sense
oscommerce says
There are literally tens of thousands of posts all about “article marketing” at the digital point forums and various other internet marketing and affiliate marketing forums. All of it is basically about churning out junk to get some pageviews and links. Really it’s about time that google caught on to the fact that this just generated tons of spam… This should’ve happened years ago.
Nick
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