Article Marketing Has Crashed! Ezine Articles Sees 71% of Rankings Drop

Article Marketing has taken the biggest hit in years. The last time Article Marketing was hit so hard was 3-4 years ago when Google tackled the dupe content produced across article directories.

ezinearticles.com - 90% loss
hubpages.com - 87% loss
buzzle.com - 85% loss
associatedcontent.com - 93% loss
articlesbase.com - 94% loss

Data is from Sistrix. It is based on a “visibility” index value that Sistrix created, which takes into account the number of keyword positions lost, specific ranking position and estimated clickthrough rate from those results.

Essentially Google is targeting content farms and put out an update on Feb 24th. Factors they *may* be using is:
- length of content (number of words)
- backlinks to individual articles
- usage metrics (such as bounce rate and clickstream data)

It looks like all article directories have been hit very hard. Here's an overview of the domains that saw most of their rankings go down (data from Sistrix):

Domain ------ Positions Lost ------ % Loss
associatedcontent.com ------ 162917 ------ 75.00%
suite101.com ------ 141469 ------ 79.00%
ezinearticles.com ------ 130231 ------ 71.00%
hubpages.com ------ 102820 ------ 67.00%
buzzle.com ------ 62049 ------ 72.00%
merchantcircle.com ------ 58666 ------ 63.00%
wisegeek.com ------ 52084 ------ 70.00%
articlesbase.com ------ 50909 ------ 62.00%
findarticles.com ------ 44621 ------ 69.00%
answerbag.com ------ 41260 ------ 61.00%
examiner.com ------ 39509 ------ 56.00%
manta.com ------ 36945 ------ 48.00%
freedownloadscenter.com ------ 34494 ------ 81.00%
yourdictionary.com ------ 32981 ------ 67.00%
lovetoknow.com ------ 31711 ------ 64.00%
trails.com ------ 29835 ------ 78.00%
thefind.com ------ 29011 ------ 39.00%
travelpod.com ------ 28513 ------ 68.00%
brothersoft.com ------ 27594 ------ 40.00%
docstoc.com ------ 26650 ------ 56.00%
fixya.com ------ 25867 ------ 42.00%
howtodothings.com ------ 25621 ------ 77.00%
mahalo.com ------ 24135 ------ 71.00%
insiderpages.com ------ 23346 ------ 70.00%
faqs.org ------ 22506 ------ 67.00%
prlog.org ------ 22254 ------ 57.00%
kaboodle.com ------ 21949 ------ 39.00%
citytowninfo.com ------ 21615 ------ 86.00%
shopwiki.com ------ 21528 ------ 43.00%
roadsideamerica.com ------ 21510 ------ 73.00%
buzzillions.com ------ 21421 ------ 48.00%
tradekey.com ------ 21096 ------ 56.00%
essortment.com ------ 20042 ------ 73.00%
uptake.com ------ 19655 ------ 58.00%
encyclopedia.com ------ 19625 ------ 51.00%
helium.com ------ 18931 ------ 66.00%
wordiq.com ------ 18877 ------ 77.00%
springerlink.com ------ 18625 ------ 49.00%
livestrong.com ------ 18175 ------ 38.00%
business.com ------ 16743 ------ 78.00%
doityourself.com ------ 16386 ------ 70.00%
americantowns.com ------ 16201 ------ 62.00%
prnewswire.com ------ 15162 ------ 70.00%
cinemablend.com ------ 14259 ------ 72.00%
epodunk.com ------ 14190 ------ 78.00%
vodpod.com ------ 13766 ------ 38.00%
labnol.org ------ 13541 ------ 85.00%
medicalnewstoday.com ------ 13426 ------ 75.00%
mytravelguide.com ------ 13340 ------ 69.00%
highbeam.com ------ 13324 ------ 34.00%
blogcritics.org ------ 13312 ------ 57.00%
chacha.com ------ 12900 ------ 48.00%
retrevo.com ------ 12601 ------ 35.00%
sharewareconnection.com ------ 12600 ------ 54.00%
planetware.com ------ 12387 ------ 75.00%
ptf.com ------ 12380 ------ 41.00%
digitaltrends.com ------ 12154 ------ 67.00%
testfreaks.com ------ 11938 ------ 63.00%
galttech.com ------ 11804 ------ 76.00%
aceshowbiz.com ------ 11639 ------ 67.00%
userinstinct.com ------ 11410 ------ 47.00%
viewpoints.com ------ 11191 ------ 55.00%
destination360.com ------ 11167 ------ 76.00%
topshareware.com ------ 11000 ------ 48.00%
consumeraffairs.com ------ 10832 ------ 80.00%
onsugar.com ------ 10699 ------ 40.00%
stateuniversity.com ------ 10560 ------ 70.00%
allbusiness.com ------ 10423 ------ 63.00%
blurtit.com ------ 10331 ------ 47.00%
everything2.com ------ 10298 ------ 76.00%
kioskea.net ------ 9781 ------ 32.00%
travelpost.com ------ 9412 ------ 75.00%
wrongdiagnosis.com ------ 9293 ------ 52.00%
technorati.com ------ 9135 ------ 67.00%
whosdatedwho.com ------ 8986 ------ 58.00%
entrepreneur.com ------ 8974 ------ 75.00%
slideshare.net ------ 8909 ------ 27.00%
geek.com ------ 8632 ------ 65.00%
gizmag.com ------ 8594 ------ 46.00%
mp3.com ------ 8577 ------ 64.00%
trendhunter.com ------ 8539 ------ 66.00%
fotosearch.com ------ 8473 ------ 48.00%
daniweb.com ------ 8316 ------ 61.00%
iloveindia.com ------ 8240 ------ 58.00%
eventful.com ------ 7948 ------ 55.00%
globalsources.com ------ 7927 ------ 34.00%
songkick.com ------ 7908 ------ 50.00%
eggheadcafe.com ------ 7828 ------ 47.00%
ubergizmo.com ------ 7807 ------ 73.00%
ez-tracks.com ------ 7779 ------ 62.00%
popcrunch.com ------ 7728 ------ 63.00%
ghacks.net ------ 7695 ------ 78.00%
healthcentral.com ------ 7660 ------ 59.00%
5min.com ------ 7652 ------ 62.00%
famouswhy.com ------ 7619 ------ 63.00%
fanpix.net ------ 7445 ------ 64.00%
ilike.com ------ 7401 ------ 62.00%
torrentreactor.net ------ 7252 ------ 29.00%
bellaonline.com ------ 7171 ------ 69.00%
hotel-rates.com ------ 7124 ------ 67.00%




The Winners:

1. youtube.com
2. ebay.com
3. facebook.com
4. instructables.com

Further Reading:

Number Crunchers: Who Lost In Google’s “Farmer” Algorithm Change?

How Demand Media Used PR Spin to Have Google Kill Their Competitors

Google Farmer Update: Quest for Quality - SEO-Blog

How Will This Effect You?

How will this effect your article marketing strategy?

 

it is amazing how something good can go bad in 1 day. i feel the change with my site to.

 

i guess google is slapping SEO's who work on links in forums, articles, etc websites. They are going to relatively new things i.e., fresh content which all search engines prefer. Lets wait and see what more impact it will have on those websites in the future

 

so what now, no more article marketing?

 

Will have to wait and see

 

I am bummed. After seven years of webmastering, I was just about to jump into article writing with both feet, and then this comes along. I'll be watching carefully to see what conclusions SEO analysts come up with after crunching the statistics for a while. I'm waiting to see: is article marketing dead? almost dead?

 

I am loving this! As an SEO Professional this is really outstanding to see Google updating their algorithm to show more reliable and accurate results. This doesn't get rid of article marketing, it just gets rid of spammy article marketing and prompts us SEO gurus to go more for quality when it comes to content and the sites we place articles on. No more spammy article posts all over the place that rank. Sure from an SEO stand point, we love that, because it's an easy ranking and easy traffic, but from a user standpoint, I would hate seeing a crappy result in the SERPS as it has been for ever lol. Overall, great job Google!

 

How does this affect blogs? A lot of well known blogs have many guest posts on them. Does this mean they too will get hit?

 

I like the info... Very nice!

What are those going to do that relied on article marketing as their way of marketing, building links, providing authority content and so-on?

You think they are going to do something else... HELL NO!.....

 

Well plain and simple, like i've said on numerous other versions of this topic here and on DP, Google doesn't mind you creating content and adding a link or two. What they mind is the terrible content you create clogging their results. Try making someting of quality, not just a bunch of spun wikipedia vomit.

Article Writers - that means for a HIGH quality, well researched and documented article you could probably charge a higher price since 12 articles will now equal 1.

Content Farms - that means stop allowing autoblogs to access your article content for 'republishing'. If you want to set up syndication networks do so a smarter way.

Webmasters - that means finding unique new content to create, possibly a reason YouTube videos now show on ~60% of search results.

why was ehow not touched? they content might be shallow, but it's clear, useful and matches google's own search data. think a little more like that and scale it to fit your needs.

 

What should we do now ?

 

One thing that I want to know is - where did you get all this information from?

 

I couldn't be happier to see it all crash and burn.

 

Well i have been practicing article marketing strategies from quite some time now, but i am shocked to see the sudden drop in rankings of article marketing sites.

 

Read the "Further Reading" above in the OP....

 

Good. I've always hated ezinearticles and their awful website and arbitrary criteria.

 

I'd also include things like lexical analysis, i.e. how technical does the article get. This is very easy to do and would nail 'shallow' articles right away.

 

looks like eHow.com serviced this algo change.
-- Not sure if their content is that good or if Google has a soft corner on them.
-- Like buying them out??

 

Squidoo hasn't lost any rankings? Wow, that's surprising!

 

great point, which would mean IF you create content it had better be high quality. Ezine will never allow citations, but they should, like a wikipedia article.

they could also be doing sitewide analysis for the first time. the said the stated goal was to get rid of content farms and scraper sites in the visible parts of the index, a quick way would be to calculate a content quality score for the domain and issue penalties across all pages that are hosted there, that would quickly nail a bunch of the scraper sites.