Ezine Articles: An important Article Submission Rule Change.

Ezinearticles rule change:Important information you must read

Submitting articles to the article submission services is a fantastic way to drive traffic to your website, affiliate offers and your blog. Without doubt the gorilla of these submission sites is Ezinearticles.com. This is the one service that has stood the test of time, raised its expectations of its authors and generally maintain a solid reputation as a resource of quality information online.

A recent change to their guidelines is in my view an important step in their article submission process and because its NEW some folk out there will be disappointed to have great articles rejected as a result of the change. However those serious about their business will make this switch easily and move on whereas others will simply move on.

O.K so what is this change, well in essence its a change in the way the “Anchor Text” guideline is policed by the service. The quote below is directly from The Editorial Guidelines at EzineArticles.com:

Website Links/URL’s
“We do not allow articles which have strategic keyword anchor text links in the body to your domain that do not add informational value to the article. Any use of anchored text links to websites that you own should add value to the article topic rather than stand out as an obvious abuse of anchored text link. The goal with this policy is to be a good net citizen by only allowing articles that add value with the anchored text links rather than for pure SEO reasons. Please limit your anchor text link length to 3 words.”

Whats changed is the way this Guideline is interpreted not in the wording but in its intent.

What EzineArticles has done is to clarify this guideline by turning it into a submission RULE. In other words a guideline is an “estimate” or a loose type of statement where you Should obey this but we may still publish good articles that are outside of this guideline.

What this change means is that your ANCHOR TEXT must strictly follow this 3 WORD LIMIT in the anchor text for future submissions. Failure to do so will result in that submission being rejected. Its that simple.

However whats not clear from the guidelines is that words such as “to, is, in, on, it, and, at, by, a, an etc do not count towards this 3 word total in the anchor text.

Also Ezinearticles has stipulated a word count length for your article. The longer the article the more words you can use in the anchor text up to a maximum of 5 words with of course the and’s, or’s etc not counting.

If your article is shorter than 400 words, each text link may only contain a maximum of 3 words*

If your article is longer than 400 words, each text link may only contain a maximum of 5 words*

to be real clear about the actual changes go read their official notice using the link below.

Read the official blog post here

In my opinion this is a positive move in the right direction. The changes that Chris and his Staff make are usually to maintain the websites reputation as a global online resource. Which if you think about that for a second, means that Authors who submit their work for consideration, and get accepted also maintain their own reputation as an expert in their field. There is nothing wrong in that.

Have your say below, and have a great weekend.

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