Think again!
Article directories are far from dead. Read on.
I just went over to Alexa, and while nobody's web statistics are 100 percent accurate (how could they be?), I found this:
Alexa is a great way to compare the relative traffic of one site over another. The lower the “Alexa Traffic Rank,” the better. The rank of 372 means that, according to Alexa's data, Ezinearticles has 371 web sites ahead of it in terms of overall traffic. Put another way, Ezine outranks in traffic nearly every web site on the internet—it loses out to only 371 out of the millions of published web sites that Alexa tracks.
So, Ezinearticles gets a lot of traffic. Why do you think that is?
Article Directory Beginnings
Before article directories were bastardized by the “SEO gurus” in existence (they're like lawyers in the real world—there is one for every web site on the planet, it seems), they served a completely noble need and two principle parties benefited:
- Article writers
- Web site publishers
Article writers won because they got to share their expertise with a world that wanted to learn. Writers may have gotten writing gigs from their exposure on article directories, but they also got the benefit of having their articles syndicated over vast networks across the internet. Further, as their work became more and more prolific and well known, these article writers became known in their fields as subject matter experts.
How cool is that?
Plus, they got links back to their own sites (backlilnks!), which drove their SEO results higher as well as  perhaps their advertising rates (higher targeted traffic = higher rates to charge advertisers).
Web site publishers won, too. Short on good content, they knew they could rely on the article directories to be full of good content (at least the human-verified ones), and part of the agreement of using an article off a directory is that the publisher not alter the content, keep the author byline, and maintain the links back to the original author.
Most web site publishers were amenable to this.
So it was win-win.
However, all good things must come to an end, and posting articles to an article directory did become overrun with SPAM, crappy content, and SEO jerks who published rubbish on them just to get a backlink from a high-authority site.
Soon, the AD's were running amok with junk articles that were badly spun, unreadable, and full of crap.
Google decided that the article directories needed punishment. After all, if the article directories couldn't police themselves, why should Google give them much credit. So Google kicked nearly all the article directories to the curb.
All of the backlinks that web site owners and publishers unwittingly got from Ezine and others became virtually valueless overnight. Traffic stopped flowing to the AD's.
SEO's, who caused this penalty in the first place, began proclaiming that “article directories are dead.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, the directories adopted stricter publishing standards, their quality went up, and the good authors there kept rising (at least relatively) to the top.
Now, I won't say that the SEO benefits of “article marketing” are as good as they used to be. But I will tell you this:
Article directories are not dead, nor is article marketing.
In fact, judging by Ezinearticle's Alexa ranking, I'd say they are doing quite well. Take a look at Go Articles — it's ranked in the top few thousand — not bad at all.
Article marketing is still doing well, too. Think about it: You write a unique, content-rich article and submit it to Ezinearticles with a link or two back to your web site. Wait a bit, write and submit some more. In a short period of time, you could become known as the “go-to guy” in your field.
That will drive a bunch of traffic back to your own web site simply because people want to know more about you and learn more from you.
So the benefits of marketing your articles on article directories remain: You will build your credibility in your field, become a recognized expert, and get a ton of direct traffic to your site, where you will have highly-targeted leads dropping into your sales funnel.
What could be better than that?
Article marketing is not dead, nor are the article directories. Make use of them and prosper.
If you leave me a comment, I'll send you a free article writing package that shows you how to write better articles so that you can take advantage of the wonderful benefits of marketing in the article directories.