Yes, they do take, but the main issue is that most of the webmasters either remove the links within those articles or replace them with their own. One of my article according to ezinearticles' stats got republished 15 times, but while browsing the phrases of my article in Google I found about 25 sites with the same content and many of them had altered the links. I contacted the webmasters to follow the ezine guidelines, and some responded positive as well, but I'm not sure that they'd have not re altered the links later.
I can understand people having to alter the text due to misspellings, atrocious grammar, etc. against ezinearticles's policy. But it sucks that people change the links. It's free content, people don't appreciate it. I got some articles for my new page the other day... didn't have time to write my own content yet, so I took some, but left the links intact. I appreciate the articles, and it's a fair deal I think.
The only reason I use the site is that clients pay me to submit them --- for say $20-$30 per --- and when it takes about 10-15 min tops to review it, add the links etc, that's $80-$120 per hour just submitting work.
They hire me to submit articles about different topics that pertain to their business while embedding links within that drives traffic. Make sense now?
No, they provide me with the articles and just tell me to embed links in various keywords, I don't write at all, like I said I submit and make good $$ for doing so. It's marketing work.
Thats a nice idea Jessica ! You must have developed an expertise in this sector. It's so fascinating indeed.
Ezine for traffic is a crap shoot. In my experience it just dilutes your own content. I have 16 articles which have been published over 200 times from the stats provided. One such article contains the some what unique string "1U rack chassis, that would later become a carputer". If you google that you will get 10-13 hits. All of those are indeed the article I wrote. I went through and checked and I believe 1 links back to ezine and the same one links back to like its supposed to. I have done that with all of the articles and some are even worse stats. So I get 1 link back for every ten free articles I supply to MFA sites. Not exactly my idea of good marketing.
One of my articles about how to apply perfect make-up has been republished on many different sites with my links intact so I get quite a few back links from it.
joanne-r, how long has the article been on the site? More to the point, how long did it take before people started getting it and using it?
I wrote a really simple CSS tutorial that was downloaded over 100 times, though it only got me a few backlinks. I changed my site from a tutorial site to a music forum though so the links are pretty much useless. I've used a couple of articles on my site before to bulk up, and I know because they are so niche that there is only the slimmest of chances that they will appear anywhere but the directory and my site.
I published it on Ezine about July this year and it took about a week to 10 days to show on Google as backlinks from other sites and the backlinks have been increasing ever since. My other articles are not doing as well though.
joanne-r, How many have you submitted? Was that the only one that got picked up? I submitted three as a test (planning to do more, but too busy). None has been picked up yet. Didn't think they were too niche-y, but maybe there just isn't enough demand for them.