For various reasons, you may receive the odd email from EzineArticles saying that you have invalid links in your resource box of one of your articles. This happens for various reasons, but usually it’s because you have changed one of the URLs that you are linking to, or maybe you have sold a domain or let it expire. In some cases your server might have had a temporary problem and your site was offline temporarily.
The advice that EzineArticles will give you is to log into your account, fix your links and all we be well. My advice is do nothing. Have I gone mad? Yes, a long time ago but that is another story, here’s why:
Since EzineArticles got hit really hard by one of Google’s original Panda updates (in 2011 I think) it has been really picky about their content. In 2012 I have written brand new, useful content about popular subjects with lengths of about 550 – 600 words and had them rejected on the grounds of not enough useful content. I must admit that I have also submitted slang ridden, quickly put together articles that have been only vaguely useful and have been approved by EzineArticles in less than 24 hours – I think I just got lucky though. So approval is now a real problem.
Here’s the 5 main reasons I think you should do nothing:
- If you go in and edit your link then your article will have to go through the approval process again and in my experience, it won’t get approved.
- If your article was written more than 2 years ago you will have probably dropped 3 links in your resource box, you are only allowed 2 now, so if you go and edit 1 of 3 links, you will be told that you can only have 2 anyway.
- If your article was on the short side, say 400 words, when you resubmit you will be told it is too short, if you fluff it out to get ’round that you will then be told your content isn’t useful, even if it is.
- Google have devalued links from EzineArticles so there is not much link juice there anyway.
- If you do nothing, after 14 days EzineArticles will unlink your link and make it just plain text, assuming you have another link in there that is OK, you will still get the benefit from that without having to go through the approval process.
So the long and short is that I believe EzineArticles has probably had its day, the links you have already from there will do you no harm, but I don’t think getting your articles re-approved is the best use of your time. I had written quite a lot of stuff in EzineArticles where I had been promoting things like private motorhome hire and I am just going to leave everything as is. If you have any thoughts, please comment below.