eZineArticles Going NOFOLLOW

**Will.Spencer** · 27 February, 2011, 11:13 AM

eZineArticles got punished in the Farmer update and their CEO is panicking.

Search Engine Algorithm Changes

"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."

**Sami4u** · 27 February, 2011, 11:25 AM

Hi,

Do you think it makes that much a difference? I never seem to get that many clicks anyway for the articles I have.

Sami

**Shenron** · 27 February, 2011, 11:37 AM

Originally Posted by Sami4u

Do you think it makes that much a difference? I never seem to get that many clicks anyway for the articles I have.

In this case it's not a matter of clicks but rather a matter of link juice passing.

Personally I get very pissed when I see ezine stuff outranking my sites, specially because most of their content actually SUCKS.

Anyhow (and I bet Will is with me in this one) I wonder when G will hunt down all the content farms that DemandMedia owns...

**bogart** · 27 February, 2011, 12:05 PM

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.

This is funny that they are posting duplicate content.

**TopDogger** · 27 February, 2011, 12:18 PM

I like the term "article vomit", which Knight uses to refer to "thinly-crafted software-spun articles".

Here are some interesting statistics about some major site that were affected.

http://www.sistrix.com/blog/985-goog...r-quality.html

.

**Andy101** · 27 February, 2011, 16:06 PM

Well, the site is called "Ezine Articles" so this implies that the articles are supposed to be distributed to eZines which are emailed Newsletters.

I think the concept is that writers submit their articles to this service and the articles get picked up by newsletter publishers to bolster their content and provide extra value to the readers of the newsletter.

The article writer then gets a chance for people that read and like their article to go and check out their website.

But maybe this concept became skewed in favor of SEO and making money from Adsense?

**tmongy** · 27 February, 2011, 20:38 PM

They actually reversed that decision for now.

In the blog post now it says:

"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."

Further down in the comments they also state:

"By adding rel=”nofollow” on all links, it proves to the search engines that our members are not here to game them. The counter-argument to keeping the links without the nofollow attribute is that there is nothing wrong with using high-quality original articles to create search engine visibility and findability.
The current day counter-argument comes thanks to a competitor that got slapped just as hard as we did and they already had 100% nofollow links since last year… which means, it’s not a main issue.
To reiterate, this topic is off the table for discussion for now. We are leaving the links alone and will not add the nofollow attribute to the links in the resource box."

So it looks like the resource box will be do-follow for the time being.