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Search Engine Algorithm Changes

Year after year since our inception in 1999, we’ve made tough decisions to ensure that we only accept high quality original articles that are exclusive to the EzineArticles Expert Authors who wrote them. In addition to the 70+ full-time people on our team who impact every single article published (quality control, link quality checking, landing page quality scoring, spam abuse detection, etc), every article is double-human reviewed by hand (primary Editor and a QC Editor).

The dual-human review process is designed to eliminate the 1-4% error rate our primary Editors may make in the subjective decision-making process … which over-time results in our members seeing a more consistent article review process and our QC Editors (our most experienced Sr. Editors) catching/deflecting low-value thin content that should never be published. We’re not perfect and we’ve also got work to do.

We’ve been both quietly and publicly at war with a small percentage of our membership who aim to use our site to game the search engines with what we refer to as “article vomit” or thinly-crafted software-spun articles. At the core of our ability to keep highly-derivative content out, we use our own proprietary software that identifies article submissions that should never be accepted so our human editors don’t make the mistake of accepting an article that on its own merit looks fine to accept but compared algorithmically against our millions of published and rejected article history, doesn’t make the grade.

This past Thursday, Google announced an algorithm change to 11.8% of their U.S. search query results. Their target was aimed at content farms that are typically low-quality sites, sites with only copied content and sites with low value content.

While we adamantly disagree with anyone who places the “Content Farm” label on EzineArticles.com, we were not immune to this algorithm change. Traffic was down 11.5% on Thursday and over 35% on Friday. In our life-to-date, this is the single most significant reduction in market trust we’ve experienced from Google.

Google has a lot of smart PhD types working on this problem that I believe is not over by a long-shot. Reason: If you do a query for popular terms that we formerly ranked very high with, instead of an EzineArticles result, you may find low-quality sites that deliver even lower value to the user than our own members’ content! This is frustrating for sure.

Why did EzineArticles do so well in the years leading up to Thursday?

Simple: Our Expert Authors DELIVERED great content that caused visitors to either click on a link back to their website or on an advertisement (how EzineArticles stays free to our members) instead of bouncing back to Google or any search engine to look for a better result. If a traffic referral to EzineArticles failed to deliver in a split second what the user was looking for, they would bounce back instantly to Google and Google could use this bounce-back data to determine if value was delivered or denied, and adjust their search results accordingly.

We’ve had a day to digest a serious amount of data to determine which series of actions we’re going to take to move past this issue and re-earn market trust with those who deliver us a significant amount of our traffic.

Here is a short-list of actions that are either already in progress or will be shortly:

Our proprietary anti-derivative software has been modified to reject another 10+% of article submissions that are not unique enough. This will result in more false positive on legit content, but that’s a risk that we feel is necessary.
Our WordPress Plugin will sunset this week and we will no longer accept article submissions via wordpress blogs directly.
We’ll be evaluating ways to reduce the number of ads per page to improve the perceived user experience and improve our members CTR (Click Thru Rate) for the traffic delivered to our members.
[UPDATED: Word count raised to 400 words.] We’re considering raising the minimum article word count to 400. Currently we give less exposure to articles that are between 250-400 words, but we still accept them. Thin content often comes under 400 words; even though I have seen many high quality articles in the 250-400 range, it is rare. 600-850 words may become the new normal with 400 being the minimum.
Our keyphrase and keyword density limits are already thought to be too intense by many, but it’s clear to us that spammers can be identified by statistically unusual keyphrase limits. Watch for the bar to be raised here.
Certain categories that are typically filled with thin, spammy content (men’s issues, reverse cell phone lookup, acai berry (which we took a harder-line position against last year) etc.) will experience an ‘over-correction’ by our team. Many thousands of articles were removed Friday and potentially tens of thousands may be removed as we complete our sweeps.
Expect to see our current article rejection rate (40.6%) climb by another ~20%.
Articles that are advertorials were already targeted by our team, but they will now get a hyper-focus to reject.
The rel=”NOFOLLOW” attribute will be added to all links on all articles very soon. Currently, it’s included in the article body of any links but now it’ll also be included in the resource box. Updated 7:30am CST Sunday: I’m less certain this move will change anything, so for the sake of this discussion, let’s remove it from the table. I will comment further below.
Articles submitted are currently required to be exclusive to you (ie: Our software and human Editors won’t find your article submission on the Internet under someone else’s or no name) but they do not need to be exclusive to EzineArticles.com. We may change our position on this and begin rejecting content that is not unique to EzineArticles.com alone. More research is needed as this would be a radical change… and one that we will invest a serious amount of market study/discussion with our members before moving ahead.

How long will that take before traffic recovers and climbs again? I have no idea. I’m hopeful that Google won’t allow sites with even lower quality content to take the positions that our members previously had occupied.

I know many will be as upset as we are about this. I’m going to leave the comments on this blog post open so you can share your thoughts and ideas for how we should respond to this event. I read every single comment and appreciate your suggestions.

We are committed to being the best platform that helps you share your expertise in the form of short, informative, high-quality original articles that can attract traffic & media exposure back to you and your website or blog.

Tags: Algorithm Changes, Human Reviewed, Original Articles, Search Engine, Single Article

The Google AdSense Business

Making money with Google AdSense is something that a lot of people attempt to do, but very few of these people actually make a nice living with AdSense. AdSense can be tough because you have to strategically position your ads in the right places on your website for maximum income.

In today’s lesson, I want to share with you some of the things that you could be doing to make more money with Google AdSense. Some work is required, but with the tips that I will be sharing with you today, you can make everything work out well for you. Here’s the first tip for having success with AdSense right away:

1) Go into a niche

You know when making money with Google AdSense, it really isn’t too different from making money with anything else online. You need to find a niche so that you can target a group of people who are looking for a particular piece of information that they can use to improve their lives.

If you go into a niche, you’ll have a better chance of connecting with your readers, and your AdSense click income will increase because you’re more focused on a smaller niche. Now if you choose to go into a niche such as fashion or entertainment, you may get a lot of visitors to your blog, but the percentage of the people who click on your ads will be incredibly low.

This isn’t hypothetical information, this is pure truth. In fact, these are 2 of the biggest niches that you can go into. You may get a lot of traffic back to your blog using social bookmarking strategies, but the quality of these visitors won’t be as good as those in a better niche – who are looking for a particular solution.

Here’s another tip for earning the kind of money that you’re looking for in your Google AdSense business:

2) Get more traffic

Now you may have picked a good niche to go into, but if you have nobody to present it to, you won’t make money. When starting out on any kind of internet marketing venture, make sure you know how to get traffic back to your blog. This is a central and core element of any online business, and without targeted traffic, you just can’t succeed.

Try to implement traffic strategies that can only deliver to you some high grade prospects, and don’t waste your time on websites that claim to get you 100,000 hits by tomorrow. Sites like this are ridiculous, and you should stay away from them if you want to earn more money with AdSense.

These 2 tips for making money with Google AdSense are things that you will definitely want to do if you want to maximize your sales and profits. Take it from me, if you want to make money from Google AdSense, now is the best time to do it. And the more you work at it, the higher the probability is that it will make money for you.

Tags: AdSense Right Away, Google AdSense, Incredibly Low, Maximum Income, Pure Truth

Home Business System

Google Home Business Cash Money System is a program that has been put into an e-book format, which includes approximately 100 pages of internet marketing strategies that helps users learn how to earn money by promoting advertisements on the most popular search engines. The way the system works is that users are taught to look for profitable affiliate programs that have little competition, but high profits. Users are also taught how to create a website, fill it with content and place advertisements on that website to create income. Here are additional pros and cons of the google home business cash money system that explain the system in more detail.

Pros

User does all work from home
System can be relatively hands free if enough websites are created
Free trial is available so user can test out system before they buy it

Cons

Must learn how to create ads that compel people to click
Must learn basic typing skills
Will need to get over a short learning curve.

Common Questions:

What technique does the program use to teach users how to make money online? Google Home Business Cash Money System teaches the affiliate marketing model and adsense model. This is where you are either paid from a sale of a product or from clicking on an add on your site.

Tags: Home Business, Internet Marketing, Money Online, Promoting Advertisements, System Work