I was just reading a blog post on Ezinearticles.  In it Chris Knight (the CEO and founder of Ezinearticles.com) was announcing a proposed change in how linking would be done.  Basically the number of outbound links an author would get through their website is 2 instead of 3.  This is not a huge difference or change and Chris Knight clearly spelled out that it was to better improve the website and particularly to reduce poor quality article submissions.  I do agree with the need to improve and remove some of the thousands of low quality articles that have proliferated around the internet (not just on Ezinearticles) with the recent years rise in popularity of article marketing as an SEO technique.

The comments went from that’s good to this is the most horrible thing since World War 2 or similar.  Some basically wanted to have a war with words with other writers and even Chris Knight.  One person even wanted to have the coined term self serving articles reworded as they found that demeaning and offensive – now that is going a little too far in my opinion.  I guess to some this article marketing and Ezinearticles is their bread and butter and they apparently have all their eggs in one basket.  Else this would not be that big a deal and wouldn’t have effected them so severely.

My comment, which amazingly no one apparently read was this:

Instead of getting mad with each other or over new rules that were actually intended (from Chris's replies in the post) to raise the level of quality articles and authors on Ezinearticles, why don't you guys all just learn the term linkbait.  If you could write true linkbait even if it was only 1 article per month, Chris would be so happy as his readership and total pageviews would go through the roof!  One properly written linkbait article can easily get 1,000,000 unique human pageviews (not just clicks which could be from multiple page views from the same reader, computers, serps, etc...).  Some have gotten many more.  I bet if someone could write him 10 true linkbait articles on any topic he would be so happy he would probably buy you a car or a vacation!  Chris knows what linkbait is and there might be only a handful, if that, of articles that qualify for this on ezinearticles.  This is not to say that anyones articles are bad.  What I am saying and so is Google, Yahoo, MSN and everyone else is that linkbait is to article marketing what mass quantity, low quality, keyword rich articles was to article marketing several years ago.  Google has rewritten its algorithms numerous times and the only thing that stays constant is quality, not quantity.  And linkbait takes quality to a whole new level.  As the saying at all SEO and SEM conferences goes - you can have the crappiest site - even sell pet rocks or bags of dirt, but if you build true linkbait with an emphasis on quality, millions will come - not hundreds or thousands as with regular articles.  Oh, by the way 200 or 300 word articles would never qualify as linkbait - ever.  I hope to see some true linkbait from all of you as it makes the internet, ezinearticles and the world, for that matter, a better place.  Now, that said, Chris, if you get just one linkbait article out of this you owe me a beer someday.

David Maillie” 

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Basically, I put the future of article writing, SEO and what they should be doing to get great results and take their websites to the next level right in front of them.  Everyone that is anyone in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) knows how valuable quality content has become.  Google has made it so quality content and natural link building will reign supreme in determining organic search rankings and they will only become more important in the future.

Linkbait when done properly is the holy grail of SEO.  Its amazing how many people just want to mass produce low quality content articles (some to the tune of thousands and thousands of these) and then they wonder why their pageviews and click throughs keep dropping and they have to produce more and more low quality content.  The answer is simple.  Poor quality dribble and basically useless content does not contribute anything to the internet and so it eventually goes to the supplemental index or similar rankings which means very limited or no traffic.

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I did a search of several terms on Ezinearticles for articles that pertain to linkbait.  Do you know what I found?  Again mostly very poorly written and mostly useless dribble.  It confounds me that these so called expert authors don’t even know what they are writing about half of the time.  This is exactly what Chris Knight was probably trying to address with his link change strategy (and maybe make some more revenue from Google Adsense by reducing other outbound links?)  The internet has become a dumping ground for millions of poorly written articles, crappy content, mass plagiarized and copied articles, spam and more.

What a lot of these authors both on Ezinearticles and elsewhere don’t understand is that the internet has and is undergoing change – a big change.  With the advent of social networks and more, along with websites like Delicious, Digg and others, users along with the search engines will get to vote on what ranks high and what goes supplemental or far enough back in the organic rankings to be virtually invisible.  As time goes on this will only become more important.  The future of the internet will be based solely on quality and not on quantity and linkbait will play a major role for many years to come.

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Another thing they don’t understand, which I didn’t mention in the above response as it wasn’t the time nor the place (Chris’s website, not mine), is that why would you write content to be mass produced all over the place on various websites, ezines, etc…  All you get in return is a few links from websites that Google basically envisions as link farms and very little click through (less than 10% of the clicks go to authors through their about me boxes or text links in the article).  The majority of the clicks go to the adsense,  other advertising or links to other pages of the ezine website to read other articles of interest.

Instead if you are going to take the time to write the content (and especially if you are going to take the time to write quality content) you should keep it to yourself and post it as a page on your own website.  You will get many more clicks and better action this way as you become the content owner and you determine where visitors clicks can go.  Also, the more original quality content your website has the better your website will rank for its search terms or keywords.  And that goes 100 fold for linkbait articles.

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The internet is a wonderful place where we each can find a home or several and contribute.  This is where the internet is going and either you adjust to these changes or, like the Ezinearticles authors that are mad at the change of one outbound link, you will eventually drift back into obsolescence.  The purpose of this was to help those that want to do better and contribute something of value to the internet community not to help those that are constantly gaming the system with black hat techniques like poor quality, keyword loaded, mass content writing.

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