Audrey writes:

Chris,

I think this is awesome. I will say I had hoped I could go to your front page, click on the category and view this information.

Let’s say someone comes to your site, seeking weight loss information. They land on your home page and click on the weight loss category. Until they click on an article, the stats info is not available.

On the flip side, if someone lands on your site as a result of a keyword search and lands right on one article, then that information is right there for the visitor to view.

Great addition to your site.

Audrey :)

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Jan Verhoeff writes:

I noticed the length of titles doesn’t seem to make a difference. They are shorter on the most published articles.

Have you found this to be true otherwise?

Jan

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Terri Z writes:

I have to agree with Audrey, I didn’t click from the email but went to the home page and clicked on a category and didn’t see it — I had to re-read the email to find the most-published articles. Maybe a link up there with “print this article”, “send to friends”, etc. — something like “see similar articles”, that would take them right to the bottom of the page where they’d see the new, most viewed, and most-published?

Jan — I notice that at least in the Business > Solo-Professionals section, almost all of the most viewed articles were posted by me (I post for several authors), probably because we posted a bunch right after Chris created the category. And we have #3 and #4 of the most-published, also. At least in some categories, longevity might be a bigger factor than title length.

My $0.02.
Terri Z

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Lisa writes:

Great new tracking tool. Thanks!

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Christina Sponias writes:

When you say that an article was the most published one, does it mean that since its publication it was the most published in other sites according to the number of publications in its category?

One of the articles you present was published on 2005!
It can be used as comparison and for studies, but this new feature is basically useful for old authors.

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Ian Ross writes:

Great feature. This should increase the quality of articles too as people try to get into the top 15!

Keep up the good work!

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Webmaster writes:

Great idea.

Nice to see many good changes to the site.

– Jill.

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Allen Taylor writes:

Excellent feature. I’d like to see it more developed. Something akin to the author ranking tool you have available in my back door tracking system. It’s great to know what the top 15 aritcles are in each category, but if I could get the number of times each of those articles have been published as well then I’d know how close I was to that. It would let me know a little better where I stand.

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Bill writes:

Great feature. Thanks for adding it.

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Dan Goodwin writes:

I agree with Allen Taylor, it’s of limited to use in terms of motivating us to get more publisher clicks because we have no idea how many the top 15 in each category are getting.

Putting this number next to each article title – like you do in the top Authors in each category – will motivate people to write more and write better quality articles I believe.

Dan

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Marte Cliff writes:

Great feature! Gives everyone an insight into which headlines are grabbing the most interest, and which articles the readers feel worth using after they get there.

Should make everyone strive to write more useful content.

I wonder how much the list will change from week-to week. Looks like this list is from all time, and obviously it will take some time for new articles to catch up to good ones that have been there for a couple of years.

Gee, you could go to a whole lot more work and create a second category – one for articles that are say, less than 60 days old.

(My family says I’m really good at thinking up work for other people.)

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Christina Sponias writes:

Marte, I agree more than completely with you! We have to see how things are working with fresh articles.

What do you thing about a list with the most published articles this year and another list with the most published articles this month?

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John Vanse writes:

Great idea Chris.

I too agree with Marte – perhaps two lists – one ‘All time greats’ and one for more current champs – I think his idea of last 60 days – or perhaps 90 days – would give you an alternative measure

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Josh Spaulding writes:

Well, it’s a great feature and it will help EzineArticles. Unfortunately, it’s also taking away from the “link juice” that was going directly to the links in our sigs and is now recycling back into EzineArticles.

But, well written articles that make it to those spots will receive loads of link love.

Great step for EA’s growth, which will help us all in the future, but I’m not sure if I’m really excited about it or not.

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Kathy Kitts writes:

This latest article is awesome! Very useful info, and right to the point. Thank you!

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John writes:

I guess I’m not as positive on this change as most seem to be. It might be a traffic boost for the minority of articles that make the list, but for the rest of the articles in a category it’s a losing proposition.

I see 3 basic reasons to publish on EzineArticles.

1) To get an article picked up and republished with some resultant increase in either referral traffic or backlinks. I keep track of this by tracking the article title, and find that the majority of sites that pick up articles butcher the resource box to the point that neither of these happens. My experience is that the traffic from republished articles is dwarfed by the referral traffic from EzineArticles itself. and the link love from Google is non existent because of the duplicate content penalty.

2) Referral traffic from the article on EzineArticles. This is a decent source of traffic, and the recent addition of the ability to track click throughs will help greatly in that respect. But adding 50% more competing Ezinearticle links on the page cannot help my referral traffic.

3) Google Page Rank boost from the backlinks in the resource box for my site. Once again, adding more links back to EzineArticles only further diminishes an already diluted Page Rank contribution. Now it looks like a typical article page will have about 50 followed links back to EzineArticles compared to the 2 you are allowed in your resource box.

Bottom line, I don’t see it as a positive change.

John

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

John,

I assumed you received no PageRank contribution from EzineArticles.com; so let’s just remove that from the table. Of course I don’t know if it’s true or not… I just had a gut assumption about a year or two ago that it was muted.

Based on your thoughts, we should IMMEDIATELY end syndication because the traffic we refer to your website appears to be the primary value you get from us and by ending syndication, we’d significantly end unethical publishers from butchering your resource box.

I think the primary reason expert authors should submit to us is for the traffic and exposure EzineArticles.com can generate by itself and any value received beyond us (ie: syndication) is purely a bonus.

Thoughts?

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Sanford writes:

It’s always good to know what people are looking for if you want to be a successful writer.

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Dan Goodwin writes:

Chris and everyone,

It sounds like this new feature can show us what kind of titles people are picking up to republish. But surely what they choose to publish is based on the whole article, not just the title?

So by keeping up to date with the top 15 published articles in our niches, we can tailor our own articles to be more in tune with this and what’s popular. Am I right in thinking that?

Otherwise I’m not sure what use it is, and why so many people seem so excited about it? Am I missing something?

Dan.

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Christina Sponias writes:

I think that there is no meaning on presenting to the public the ‚¬“most published articles‚¬ near my recent articles for example, because I cannot compete with authors that wrote articles since 2005. I started this year, on March.

Their articles will be in the list, while mine will have to wait who knows how long to appear in the list, even though my articles can be even better than the ones the Ezine presents as being the most published ones and my readers may wonder why my articles are not in the list if they are so good, because they won’t think that this feature is for all authors in general and it depends on a lot of time.

They tend to believe that this list is about recent articles.
I think it should be presented only for us authors, so that we may have their example, not to the public.
If the Ezine wants to show to everyone which articles are the best ones, the most published in other sites, etc, it has to consider fresh articles, otherwise the Ezine is not promoting new author’s works; on the contrary, the Ezine is promoting authors that may have stopped to write.

Another point that I consider wrong is the top author in any category. I believe that if the author doesn’t write more articles, he or she shall lose the throne.

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Marte Cliff writes:

I agree with Chris. What we get from EzineArticles is the focus, and the syndication is a bonus. We all know our resource box will be altered – or eliminated entirely – but that’s the price we pay for having any content on the web. Doesn’t matter if it’s here or on our own web sites – someone can steal it and call it their own.

Think of it as a compliment! An annoying compliment, but a compliment just the same.

Perhaps we all need to just lighten up!

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Josh Spaulding writes:

I assumed you received no PageRank contribution from EzineArticles.com; so let’s just remove that from the table. Of course I don’t know if it’s true or not! I just had a gut assumption about a year or two ago that it was muted.

You haven’t implemented the rel=”nofollow” attribute so of course pagerank is flowing. Although the ultimate benefit should not be the PR you receive, many people believe it is.

I myself focus on getting visitors directly to my site through the sig, but the PR boost helps as well.

I’ve promoted a few niche sites solely by submitting articles to EzineArticles and a couple others. A few of those sites hold PR4 and rank on page one of Google for their long-tail keywords. That’s proof that our articles do receive a decent about of link juice from EzineArticles and other good article directories.

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Josh Spaulding writes:

Also, these days big newsletter and ezine publishers aren’t taking articles from article directories. I’m sure there are a select few but it’s not as likely to happen now as it was in the past. They know that 99% of them are spammed all over the Internet and will do them no good.

The effective way to get articles published by ezines and newsletters these day is by contacting them direct and offering a unique articles solely to them.

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John writes:

Chris,

On your question re: syndication. The online landscape has changed over the last couple of years, and you are the one that has to come up with a business model that works for you. From my perspective, not syndicating the articles would have a minimal impact on either referral traffic or SERPs, but that is admittedly a minuscule sample size.

On the original topic of this thread, you are fond of pointing out that the article is our “give” and the resource box is our “take”. However you want to gauge the value of that resource box, be it “reputation” or “exposure”, referral traffic, Page Rank or link love, I can’t see how any of these is enhanced by adding another 15 competing links to the article page.

John

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

Josh,

Actually, I see articles from EzineArticles picked up all the time by ezine publishers.

Despite the fluff that get sent in, there are some seriously high quality articles within our site and I believe many ezine publishers are using our advanced search to identify the best articles or they know the reputation of a particular author and then drill into their article history to select content to syndicate.
http://ezinearticles.com/?type=advs

—

I never made the argument that the addition of 15 more outbound links would do anything for our members other than help them identify which articles in each category have ezine publisher interest (data never shared before).

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Jennifer Thieme writes:

At first I was excited about this change. But now I don’t know. The idea of extra, competing, links on the page does not thrill me. And, as somebody else mentioned, I have no idea how many articles I need to write to get into the top 15 of the usual catagories I write for. This could mean that “the rich get richer,” as the Most Published articles are now getting more exposure, and are likely to get more and more published.

On a more general note: I see that some of the Most Published articles have typo’s in their titles! Makes me wonder who is picking up these articles, and where they are being used.

Also, many of the “top” articles have short titles, as somebody here already noted. For example, in the Taxes catagory, the Most Published article is called, “Income Tax.” Talk about short, general, and vague! No long tail there.

At the very least, it’s been enlightening to see these lists. Thanks Chris. I know you mean well, and I’m sure you will tweak the system to benefit the best authors, as you always have.

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

Jennifer,

Yeah, I think we’ll seriously consider shortening up the time span for this new feature and the most viewed articles to a 30-90 day time span so it becomes more of a current day view of “what’s hot”…

We do keep track of our aggregate outbound clicks to members before and now after this change. Within a few more weeks of data collecting, we’ll know if this had any negative impact on our members or not… and you can be assured I’ll share either way.

Another option we could do is reduce it to the top 10 recent, 10 most viewed and 10 most published as that would remove 15 exit clicks… I’m just not sure this will have any negative impact on our members, so we’ll test and report back later.

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Josh Spaulding writes:

Another option we could do is reduce it to the top 10 recent, 10 most viewed and 10 most published

I think that’s a great idea Christopher. That way everyone can still benefit from the great data you guys provide and the signature links won’t be so saturated.

I hope you haven’t taken my previous comments the wrong way. In no way do I think an author should base their decision to submit articles to EzineArticles, or any other article directory for that matter, on the SE benefits of the link in their sig. I just want to make it clear that it is a decent sized benefit and the recent change would lower the value of that.

EzineArticles is still the best article director out there and I’m sure it will remain to be. It’s very good see you and your team accepting suggestions and at least considering them!!

Well done!

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Jan Verhoeff writes:

As a test, I’ve occasionally shortened my titles and given my articles silly titles like Ding-a-Ling, Ding-a-Ling but the funny thing is, the quality of the content has even brought those articles to the top of the charts, particularly on google. I know I’m not the best speller in the world, and I wrote an article about that particular topic once. Chris is forever and always correcting my blog posts (Thanks Chris!!!). I remember one particular article, I published with a title I’d been working with and forgot to put a “REAL” title on the article. By the time I realized it, I noticed it had been published two or three times, and decided to google before I fixed it. Two of the publications are world class publications with high-brow readers. One of those sent me a request for a specific article for their publication afterward, because “Your title was so crisp and fresh, we thought it had a major impact on our readership.” Ahem… I was almost embarrassed by the title!

And, there’s a good ole boy out there somewhere publishing the dickens out of my Branding Iron articles because I quite often get reference messages on my site from folks who have read something about Branding their business and like the ‘country girl voice’ I use. Hey, when you come in from branding and cutting cattle to type out four or five articles while waiting on the shower to warm up from the last cowpoke – you write that language!

The bottom line is – it comes down to quality and solid content with a value driven resource box.

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Mindy Makuta writes:

I’d like to see most viewed/most published articles available without having to read an article in the category

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