EzineArticles.com has always been one of the more popular directories to submit your articles to for picking up those much needed incoming links. It has been my favorite for some time now, but recently, as of the last article I submitted a few days ago, they have become extremely picky in allowing live links in your author’s box.
I’ve never had a problem with EzineArticles.com after submitting nearly 50 articles over the last 3 years or so, but with the last one the scenario went something like this - I went through the usual process and sent in my article only to have it rejected for “linking to a website that violates our terms of service.” Since I have never had a problem I wrote to support and asked for a better explanation. The answer came back that the website I was linking to, a Build A Niche Store site, was nothing but auctions and I needed at least one page of content before they would consider it a legit site.
Obviously the noobie editor that went to my site didn’t see any of the 10 article pages featuring no auctions at all. I sent him a list of of those 10 urls, and while he thanked me, he still wouldn’t allow me to link to any auction page on the site, even though the specific one I wanted to link to had 3 paragraphs of text and an information widget. I had to link to article pages only! While this is still an good incoming link, it totally defeats the purpose of using anchor text to get a particular page quickly ranked in Google by using EzineArticles.com.
While there are plenty of other article directories to use for the intended purpose of links to very specific pages, EzineArticles.com was definitely the best in my book. I will continue to use them for many of my other niches, but not any longer for BANS related sites. Maybe it was a new editor or maybe they’ve just developed a snooty attitude towards certain types of linking.
EzineArticles.com is still a great place to work your article marketing efforts, just be warned that they’ve apparently adopted a stricter policy towards linking to BANS or eBay auction related sites.