EzineArticles.com hit hard by Google: The impacts
EzineArticles.com is one of the hardest hit websites post the first Google Panda update in the US. According to Sistrix, EzineArticles.com lost 90 percent of its index score. Sistrix VisibilityIndex takes into account traffic on keywords, ranking and click-through rate.
Still yet to recover from the first Google Panda update in the US, EzineArticles.com was hit hard again, this time with the updates from Google UK, and so on, as reported by WebProNews. As Google Panda update goes global, Google US itself has just made a new adjustment to the algorithm.
According to another update by Sistrix, referring to the same Sistrix VisibilityIndex, EzineArticles.com lost 78% of the index score. Not good.
Traffic-wise, EzineAricles.com report in its blog that the website lost up to 35 percent traffic – probably more today, despite still serving more than 1 million visitors a day.
So yes – to clarify the confusion – unlike what many assume, EzineArticles.com doesn’t lose 90% of its traffic – it lost 90% of the Sistrix index score, but they lose between 10 to 35 percent of traffic.
As a reference, you can see that EzineArticles.com Alexa rank is rising steadily (with Alexa, lower rank means better – just like in golf.) The website ranks 109 over a 3-month period, 137 in 1-month period, 166 in the last 7 days, and 209 yesterday.
What EzineArticles.com does to tackle the issues
The most plausible action is that EzineArticles.com CEO Chris Knight is not hiding behind a closed door; he addresses and communicates the issues on regular basis, and he does personally answers comments from EzineArticles.com blog.
To stop the traffic from sliding down further, EzineArticles.com aims to get back on track and has done some quick update on many things, including the updated article submission guidelines, article quality assurance guidelines, and a shortlist of actions to get back on track that will be revised along the way, incorporating feedback from the blog readers – please also read the interesting discussions below the blog post.
In general, EzineArticles.com will emphasize content “thickness” – articles that are more than 400 words will be better featured on the directory than those that are less than 400 words in length, while ensuring approved articles’ quality is at the highest level possible via stricter article moderation.
Have the changes effective?
It’s yet to be seen. EzineArticles.com is still losing traffic and search engine positions. But business-wise and content-wise, the changes made are all for the better for both EzineArticles.com and the article writers.
Better quality articles, better article moderation, and better exposure for longer articles – all are for the better, I suppose.
Ivan Widjaya
EzineArticles.com and Google Panda update