So I’ve kept out of all the furor the last few months regarding Ezine Articles getting too big for their boots. After all, when you’re as big a fan of article marketing as I am, then anything that seems designed to make the whole experience better for the genuine folks out there has got be good news.
And let’s face it, the changes they’ve made have all seemed to be designed as a way of making sure that crappy articles don’t get published and so make it harder for the good articles to be found. When some lazy bum rehashes a piece of crap that consists of a couple of hundred , badly structured, badly spelt, utter gibberish and yet manages to cheat their way into the most viewed section… well, it’s a good job I’m too much of a lady to say what I really think. (at least not on Google, lol).
And by the way, if you’re wondering how you can cheat your way into the ‘most viewed’ section, it’s easy. You just ‘buy‘ the views. You didn’t really think those articles were there because they were actually any good did you?
Article Length
According the editorial guidelines, articles must contain a minimum of 250 words and a maximum of 5,000 words. Great. But also note that their ‘ideal’ is between 400 and 750 words! Well, that may be their ideal, but what if it’s not yours, or more importantly, what if it’s the right number of words to get your point across, provide the information that the reader is looking for, and get them interested enough that they click back to your site for more information?
Links Within Articles
Once again, the editorial guidelines allow a maximum of 4 links, shared between the article and the resource box. Only two of those links can be ‘self serving’, that is, point to your own sites. And they can’t both be in the body of the article. In fact, unless the link is to a page/site that adds additional value to the actual article, you can’t have any of your self serving links in the article itself.
But if you don’t have your own site, (which you really should by the way), don’t think you can link to an affiliate site. Because EZA don’t allow you to choose that option. Unless you have your own domain and are using a redirect. Hmm, now if you can use a redirect, why not just allow you to link directly to the affiliate site in the first place?
Anchor Text
One of the beautiful things about article marketing is the ability to generate lots of lovely links back to your own site, and so help you rank higher in the search engines. And of course, to do that you need to be using the right keywords in your anchor text.
If the phrase you want to use is 3 words or less, you can get away with writing an article under the 400 word limit. If the phrase is between 5 and 3 words, your article has to be over 400 words. If the phrase you want to target happens to be more than 5 words, you’ll have to find another article directory to submit your article to!
Article Categories
EZA kindly provide a list of category guidelines for you to use when submitting your article. However, for the home based business owner, your articles don’t qualify to be placed in the ‘business’ category.
The main business category is reserved for small, medium, large and enterprise-level business articles and this does not include Internet or Home-Based-Business articles.
When you look at some of the sub categories within the business category, you have to ask yourself why your articles shouldn’t be published there.
Business: Branding - essential for anyone working online to be able to brand themselves and their home based business effectively. Yet you can’t submit articles on this topic to this category.
Business: Customer Service – if you want to educate your readers on the importance of building good customer relations you can’t use this category.
Business: Entrepreneurialism – if this isn’t for online marketers I don’t know what the hell is.
Business: Marketing Direct – believe it or not this sub category includes articles devoted to such things ‘mlm business leads’ and ‘network marketing’. Yet the home based busienss owner can’t submit their articles here?
The list goes on, you can check it out here.
Unfortunately, it has to be said that in many respects EZA are getting too big for their boots. Instead of just booting out the crappy article marketers, they’re taking a sheep dip approach and forcing everyone to suffer because of the antics of a few.
Personally, I’ve never been a fan of sheep dipping. 
