I have heard that sites that did article submissions onto article directories got penalized. Is this true? If so, should I not submit any articles to sites like Ezine, and the rest of them?
It's not a penalty, it's just that all the article directories were heavily devalued. Links you have from article sites should be worth less now.
Some probably will be, some won't. We just have to wait and see, as the info released is open for interpretation (i.e. what exactly is a definition of poor quality sites? content farms?).
It's pretty much the article directories. They all lost an obscene amount of rankings without exception. That and sites like associatedcontent mostly.
The relevance of submitting articles to these directories has considerably diminished by the recent algo changes.
You just keep continuing submitting articles as you were doing. It'll not harm you moreover it'll increase the importance of your site and page rank as well.
Its still important one way link building technique. One thing you should keep in mind while submitting articles is that an article should not be copied and should not be submitted to hundreds of directories...you should limit it to 5 to 10 article directory sites...
Links from article directories are always useful. I regularly submit article in different article directories and being benefited from the same.
Links from good article directories are always good. Why not just place the articles on your own website?
does this change affects only American article submission sites? are other languages also affected by this?
Quality and fresh content will be helpful for keyword ranking. I thing guest blogging is good option to link building.
Articles will always be useful; the problem is how people are using them. Spunned and low quality content proliferates with a sole purpose of building links to the money site. This will have to be devalued as well, overtime. Ezinearticles has always been generous in checking the articles, so I wouldn't worry that much if you've been submitting to this site like crazy. Other top directory sites such as articlesbase, goarticles, etc. might be a little bit shaky. Articles will stay forever. We just have to use them properly.
That's why you should always change up your articles - don't use the same one on so many sites. Why not focus on writing quality articles on certain sites - used as promotion for your site? Its why I don't write so many articles these days.
Article submission will never go. Its just a bad phase for quite few article submission sites, thanks to new google algo. However one should still cont. with it as sooner or later that will be back in action more or less if we cont. with the same that will only increase our quality and will not depreciate it. Correct us if we are wrong