EzineArticles - is there any point now?

[TellThemEverything]

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-farmer-update-analysis-of-winners-vs-losers shows EZA got hit 90% - that's "significant"!!

I do a lot of article marketing for my ecommerce sites - and seomoz tools show that my top 5 links are from there currently.

However, with recent developments should i scale back my article marketing efforts? I only ask because my key author just quit  I honestly are wondering if the big article database I have right now is sufficient, or if I should continue.

Thoughts?

[ChrisMacNaughton]

If you can find a good author to replace the one who left I would suggest that it can help, you will continue to regularly build some links to your site in addition to the ones you already have.

As I'm sure you've heard, just because you stop building links doesn't mean your competitors have stopped so it is always a good idea to keep working on that.

[blackballonline]

Time to diversify and in a hurry. Good old fashioned niche directories still work and haven't gotten crushed nearly as bad as the farms. The trickle down effect is sure to come and when it does it won't be pretty if most of your campaigns were based on articles. Try the juicy link finder tool or any number of the other link tools here.There is also this awesome linkbuilding resource to get you going.

One more tactic I use here is to use the keyword difficulty tool to find the top ranking sites for your terms and do an OSE analysis for gems.

[StalkerB]

It depends what you were getting out of it.

EZA and the like haven't passed a huge amount of link equity for a while now but what it was quite good for it getting stories picked up by other (admittedly fairly low quality) sites and getting a few extra links that way.

Are you not using the content on your site in some capacity?

Rather than take the full hit of articles as a link building expense, why not start a blog and then slightly rewrite them for article directory submissions? Or try and find some way to get extra value back from the articles (Squidoo page, hubpages, etc.)

If however you were getting a lot of traffic from the articles which you're no longer getting it may be time to knock that on the head and put your efforts (and cash) elsewhere.

[TellThemEverything]

Thanks Barry. Yes, I've got a lot of links this way but as you say, of varying worth. I have been switching my efforts to guest blogging recently anyway, so I still need fresh content - but with over a 1000 articles I could probably get away with just rewriting from that pool.

Actually I havent seen any hit to my EZA traffic and in fact traffic to my site increased 25% after the google update so I'm not panicing yet - but I think it's fair to say that google is shutting some doors for us, and suggesting that we look for better methods of link building..

[leaseman]

Aside from seo as a benefit, we get some pretty decent traffic from our article directory sites. It's not the best but is considered another reason we submit to article directories.