Rumors of the departure of Ezine articles have been greatly exaggerated, to paraphrase Mark Twain and Captain Picard of the Enterprise. Ok, well maybe the phrase significantly is a bit of a reach here, but the reality is that I really do believe that Ezine articles is nonetheless pertinent to SEO. Here's why:

Think about What Google Truly Wants

Google's Panda update was about obtaining the crap out of their search results. This meant getting rid of the crap that content farms put out there so that they can position for any and every key word while at the same moment trying to ensure the truly useful content might rise to the top of the rankings.

Today this doesn't indicate that content farms are bad -- it simply means they should shift and provide genuinely helpful, quality content rather than providing rubbish which just grabs keyword positions.

It Forced Ezine to Modify Their Guidelines

In essence, this current upgrade has forced Ezine Articles and anyone else for that matter who wants to actually remain applicable in a post Panda world to tweak their content and their rules so that they have content which is worthy of getting into the SERPs to begin with.

While Ezine unquestionably took a huge hit in the SERPs after the Panda upgrade, I do believe that they are working to improve the quality of their material, deleting crap which has no value and insisting on a higher regular of articles for their service than what they used to need (though to be fair, they usually had a higher standard than another article websites).

Think about the Purpose of Ezine Articles

Another matter to consider is the original purpose of Ezine Articles. It is there in the title. The original cause that Ezine was created wasn't to straight rate in the SERPs but to provide you with direct hyperlinks from additional sites and or Ezines.

Today as the hyperlinks from sites may not be especially helpful provided that you'll get hit with the replicate articles penalty, the Ezines can prove beneficial, if not from an search engine optimization viewpoint then at least from the point of view of merely driving additional traffic to your web site, which is in the end the purpose that you set content onto Ezine Articles to begin with.

They are Large Enough to Weather the Surprise

I do believe that we'll see an increasing failure rate amongst article directories (the newer ones and the ones that are perhaps not well-known and or do not have strong standards were already declining at an alarming rate actually before Panda).

That's you either end up with a great deal of junky junk and because earning money from an article listing is hard or you end up with a huge work of sifting through all the posts and looking for the handful of good ones. Ezine Articles yet, since they're the granddaddy of the article directory world, can invest enough to jump back and rebuild their rankings over time.

Important Thing

No, Ezine Articles weren't thought by me is dead for the long term. However, I do believe you should find other backlink techniques and not depend merely on them as well as mostly on them for the close to mid future.