Ezine articles - worth it with a PA of 1?

[seanmccauley]

If I write an article on Ezine Articles, it has a page authority of 1. I guess this is to be expected until that page is crawled, but is it actually worth writing these articles? Does the DA 'count' for anything here? Can I ever expect the PA to increase? (unless I build links to the article - in which case I may as well spend that time building links to my site)

[firstconversion]

DA does count, but its not worth the effort if you just post it and leave it - you still need to do the work to give that page PA, its not going to happen magically

Have a look at this suggestion from ViperChill - link to your other articles in each article you write to raise the PA of your distributed writings

Have a plan that has maybe 10 posts in it, pick 10 decent article directories and link between each. Then use open site explorer after a month to see if its picked any of the articles up

(or just write one really great post for a popular blog in your industry and get a ton more links, reads etc)

[seanmccauley]

Excellent blog post on the subject - thank you.

[MarieHaynes]

I don't waste any time with article sites any more.  It may work for some, but not for me.

I tried some tests last year where I took a medium competitive keyword and wrote a bunch of articles on ezine with anchor texted backlinks using that keyword pointing back to my site.  I did no other SEO for those keywords.  They did absolutely nothing to help my site.

Now I spend the time writing articles for my own site.  But, the difference is that I don't whip up an article in 15 minutes any more.  I spend about a week creating an incredible article - with pictures and charts and really good information that can't be found elsewhere on the web.  If that article attracts even one relevant link it is much more worthwhile than an ezine article any day.

[Websensejim]

Stephen has hit the nail on the head. In order to take advantage of a site's DA, you have to build up the PA and you do that by building links to it. The beauty of it is that you only need a handful of links, then the PA really soars.