Correct me if I am wrong, you are saying saying I can use a common keyword to my site in an article I write (like soaking) and and link back to an article on my site which delves a bit deeper into the subject matter of the keyword.

Please forgive my ignorance…what I do…I do as a ministry and have no grand SEO plans or even understand completely how to do SEO for the most part but this sounds like it will help me.

If I go back and edit a couple of my articles, I assume they will need to follow the new rules…OK with me but I need to know…

Blessings
Brenda

I’m not sure about the non-self serve links. I would think it would depend on the content and how valuable it is to the public.

As for Adsense, I come here to read articles and never even see the advertisements. They mean little to me.

Distinction: An article can be 1,000+ words and still be ‘thin’ on content.

If the <5% of members who scam us were told they had to meet a 450 word limit to scam us, they'd just increase their word count and now our users would have 200 more meaningless words to read to 'find the point'...if they found a point at all.

I'm not sure Wikipedia example is relevant because Wikipedia requires nobility in intent & purpose whereas many of our members are 'marketers' by nature. There is nothing wrong with being a 'marketer'... heck, my degree is in Marketing... but we are at war with overly efficient members who submit thin content with an intent to spam us to get SEO juice at any cost.

Please see the bullet points in this blog entry where I outlined it was more than just 'thin' content as the reason for this change;
http://blog.ezinearticles.com/2008/04/2-self-serving-active-links.html

If ‘thin’ articles are the problem, just reject automatically anything under, say, 450 words. If quality is the problem, get the editors to show some teeth in their rejections.

Reducing links on the basis that spammy articles use them too much for ’self serving purposes’ (I thought that’s what Bum Marketing was all about) is like banning Wikipedia for being spammy because it has too many links on each page, both internal (self serving) and external.

Sam said:

“EzineArticles.com has always been the second highest traffic source behind search engines for most of my websites. Therefore, I think this is a great move by Christopher Knight (owner of EzineArticles.com) because this will uphold the credibility and quality of every article submitted to them.”

That’s one of our goals… to be your 2nd highest source of pre-qualified visitors to your website after the search engine referred traffic.

Sam further said:

“The key to article marketing is not about the number of links placed within your author’s resource box – It is always about good quality content. Articles with 3 self-serving links look spammy anyway, so let’s scrap this old rule and embrace the new rule now.”

My experience with blogs and other user content generated sites is that even if you do something like nofollow your comments it has no impact on the amount of spam/ thin content you get. The only way I see you getting rid of thin content is editorial control, which you are already working fairly effectively as near as I can tell.

In fact, there are spammers who leverage your own Ezine articles to spam comment your own site. It’s the nature of the web these days.

I definitely see a big increase in traffic when I have an article published here, so the numbers do speak for themselves. I would rather write and read quality articles than the spammy-looking, thin ones we see all too often on the web. Spammers ruin everything good because they are lazy and self-serving.

Keep up the great work Chris.

With solid content, even if one self-serving links, people will stick click on it.

This is a good move to get rid of thin content on EzineArticles.com.

Cheow