To paraphrase Mark Twain and Captain Picard of the Business, rumours of the passing of Ezine articles have been greatly exaggerated. Alright, well perhaps the word greatly is a touch of a reach here, but the truth is that I do think that Ezine articles is nevertheless useful to search engine optimization. Here's why:

Think about What Google Really Wants

Google's Panda upgrade was about getting the junk out of their search results. This meant getting rid of the crap that content farms put out there so that they could rank for every keyword and any while at the same period trying to make sure the truly useful content would increase to the best of the rankings.

Today this doesn't indicate that content farms are poor -- it just means they should shift and offer genuinely useful, quality content as opposed to providing junk which just grabs keyword ranks.

It Forced Ezine to Tweak Their Principles

In essence, this current update has forced Ezine Articles and anyone else for that matter who wants to really remain useful in a post Panda world to tweak their content and their rules so that they have content which is worth getting into the SERPs to start with.

While Ezine definitely took a massive hit in the SERPs after the Panda upgrade, I do think that they are working to enhance the quality of the material, deleting junk which has no worth and insisting on a higher regular of content for their support than what they used to require (though to be fair, they usually had a higher standard than another article websites).

Think about the Objective of Ezine Articles

One other matter to consider is the original purpose of Ezine Articles. It's right there in the title. The first purpose that Ezine was developed wasn't to immediately rate in the SERPs but to provide you with direct links from other blogs and or Ezines.

Today whilst the links from blogs might not be particularly useful given that you'll get hit with the duplicate content charges, the Ezines can prove beneficial, if not from an SEO viewpoint then at least from the standpoint of just driving additional traffic to your website, which is after all the purpose that you place content onto Ezine Articles to start with.

They are Huge Enough to Weather the Storm

I do feel that we'll see a growing failure rate amongst article sites (the newer ones and the ones that are perhaps not well-known and or do not have strong requirements were already declining at an alarming rate actually before Panda).

That is because earning money from an article listing is difficult and you either end up with a great deal of junky junk or you end up with a substantial job of sifting through all the articles and looking for the couple of great ones. Ezine Articles yet, because they're the granddaddy of the article directory world, should be able to commit enough to bounce back and rebuild their ranks over time.

Important Thing

No, I do not believe Ezine Articles is lifeless for the long lasting. But, I do believe you need to find other backlink strategies and not rely just on them as well as mainly on them for your close to mid future.