I've been writing articles on the same small handful topics at ezine while switching up my keywords for over a year now for one niche in particular and for awhile I was getting a great deal of views on them. Judging by my analytics, however, over time it seems like that number has plummeted which I don't understand. I don't get how for so long at recycling the same topics over and over again I was getting regular good numbers of views but in the past few months inexplicably without changing anything those numbers have plummeted. I'm talking about fresh articles which I continue to write and submit but based on the same topics. Obviously I can't be expecting sales when I'm getting 10 visitors to that niche's site per day. Interestingly enough the clickthrus of those articles have stayed about the same as it always was, just the views themselves for the articles at Ezine have gone way down. In addition to plain conversions, with little to no daily traffic it makes it impossible to test and tweak my landing pages, so this is key that I figure this out. Thanks all.
The issue is Google is starting to phase out article views for rankings. I knew it was coming and now it's here. Next to go is Comment links
I really do not think Google can completely ignore article directories! They might just favor one directory to another. However, I think a day will come when article directories wont just be as important and powerful as they are today. Spamming and wrong information could be the cause. Even Ezine articles which claims to check every article, there is still so much spam content there!
I think it is probably more to do with EZA themselves and how they are presenting articles within their site too - how much exposure, access, importance they give them. at the end of the day they look after their interests above all... try not to put all your eggs in one basket - keep looking for new sources of traffic, or even better - build your own sites and get them ranked!
I have noticed the same thing when I submitted a few articles a couple of weeks back. Low page views but a good clickthrough rate. I see that it is not the same as it was before so I just use other traffic methods and article directories along with EA.
I think Blasingame meant that google was using article views ("how much an articles have been viewed") as a way of ranking articles. This now have changed probably due to people abusing it by pinging their articles for more page views and therefore more ranking...
they just try to change something on ezine. it is not what it used to be, it became more complecated with them. luckly enough there are other article directories
well, i'm sure this is something temporary and it depends on your articles, titles and niche itself. but eventually some chili will turn things around...
Without promoting your articles, I'm afraid there are little to no chances to get TONS of traffic to your sites. You have to submit 10/20 articles each and every day to keep the traffic coming otherwise all articles slowly die off. There's dozens of other elements that are vital when when optimizing your articles - Keywords, Titles, Resource Boxes --- using strong call to actions. Al.
The thing is tho I used to get substantial views writing the same articles over and over again without changing a thing and over time they just started to drop off. I used unique keywords each time. I backlink each one multiple times by rewriting and submitting to about 7 other article directories. Anyone have any other suggestions on what to do to create more traffic to those articles/better optimize them in the serps?
Do you check your competitors and the number of links they have for a particular keyword ? You might be needing more links, hence targeting valuable keywords. That's won't work any more, at least it's not enough to get your articles ranked. Al.
Man stop giving bad advice to people to write 20 articles per day. I don't know why but if you look at the serps you can see that most fresh ezine articles or any other article directory for that matter lands no more than page 2. You can thanks for Jeremy Kelsal for this who advice people to use Xrumer as their backlinks to articles. Even low tail keywords which before was very easy to get into first page without any backlinks, you need tons of them now.
Its all depends on a niche competition, let me give you a real example of mine when I when I was using EZA to write article about how to "fix red ring of death" a year ago, I was getting around 200 to 300 views a day and the article was dieing after 15 to 20 days. Now the condition is ,when I write on same topic I receive 10 to 20 views a day and article dies after 4 to 5 days. Now the question is why this happens? The answer is pretty simple, the niche is lot more competitive now than a year ago. People have build tons of links to targeted keyword so eventually your non promoted EZA article doesn't rank well. Solution for this, enter a niche which is new or promote your article till you get the 1st page ranking. I don't think this is going to happen because google is favoring web 2.0 properties like anything and article directories are the foundation of web2.0 concept. Spamming can be done any where on net where the content is generated by users. Its all about backlinks when it comes to google.
Too many people have spammed article directories, but they are still one of the most effective ways to get backlinks and traffic.
Yeah I'm really working with my analytics today and even from just the beginning of this year my traffic is seriously down. I guess I need to seriously get back to basics and find some new ways for traffic and to promote and like someone said hit new niches.