Great value here and looks like it’s been greatly appreciated by your readers. Great topic and helpful analysis. Well done.

Additionally there is something to be said for an increased number of readers / exposure that you can still gain from a site even if the links are only used for discovery and anchor text.

Thanks for doing the legwork to uncover the top article directories. Taking the time to locate the top directories and filter them by traffic and no follow links is a great help. I’m looking forward to jumping on the ezine article bandwagon in the coming months.

I’ve been having a further think about the value of traffic that some of the higher ‘nofollow’ directories might offer. I will do a more detailed breakdown of traffic that each directory receives in my next post – rather than simply relying on the Alexa rating, (which is only a ranked order of the directories, but doesn’t provide any sort of traffic weighting).

Also, according to the Articlesnatch.com blog, the reason they introduced nofollow tags was to “help recover from a strong Google Filter”. Quite conceivably, articles on directories with nofollow tags may have a better shot at themselves ranking on Google. This is something that could end up being quite important for micro niches where there isn’t too much competition for a keyword / phrase.

I haven’t tested this mind you, but it may be worthwhile including a couple of the stronger ‘nofollow’ directories in my final list of the top 10 article directories. Particularly if the submission requirements are consistent with those for other directories and the same article can be submitted to multiple places.

I have been trying to make use of the power that article directories have more and more, not only for the links but also for traffic.
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Gee, I take your point – there certainly is more to marketing than just building links. I did take a fairly link heavy analysis in my post, but this was as a basis to help decide between the huge number of article directories available. In my next post I’ll be getting down to some of the finer points about the top 10 article directories on my shortlist, and why there are other factors which make some of them less suitable.

There is a sacrifice to be made either way in deciding whether to go for directories with higher traffic, and having either nofollow tags or a comparatively low page rank, or going for those directories with a higher pagerank.

In terms of getting traffic from the article itself, all things being equal, having nofollow links wouldn’t seem to make a difference. And this is fine if the relevant links in an article are directed to someone else’s sales page, as building the search ranking for that site wouldn’t really be a priority for us.

However, for the purposes of building authority to a particular site and search engine rankings for a term on that site, avoiding nofollow tags would seem to be quite important. I’d rather go with those directories which cover both bases.