Last updated: Mar 26th, 2014

Screenshot of Buzzle.com
Screenshot, Nov. 2010.

Buzzle.com - A Review

Rating: Happy FaceHappy FaceNo Happy FaceNo Happy FaceNo Happy Face (2/5)

Buzzle is a formerly popular article directory, used primarily for online article marketing and self-publishing. In this review, I consider Buzzle's performance, features, and professionalism, compared especially to EzineArticles, which used to be my article directory of choice. I also provide some concrete suggestions for how Buzzle could be easily improved.

A lot of the discussion here is a moot point; Buzzle changed their policies and no longer allows links in article footers, making them effectively useless for article marketing (and removing the only form of compensation authors were ever given--they've never been paid so now there is no reason to publish on this site).

Buzzle, together with EzineArticles and many other similar sites, was hit hard by the Google panda update. Whereas Buzzle at one time was one of the two most valuable article marketing sites for driving traffic to a website, it became almost useless in this regard following panda. After this, Buzzle changed their policies, effective barring its use for article marketing.

Before the panda update, Buzzle performed about as well as EzineArticles in terms of driving traffic to a website. However, my experience with the site was that the administrators were highly unprofessional in how they treated me as an author. Buzzle also lagged behind in terms of features and interface. The unprofessional treatment, in my case, was extreme enough that I ended up deleting all my articles from Buzzle, even before Buzzle had changed their policies, barring article marketing entirely. Once the panda update rolled out, and Buzzle's traffic fell off, I saw no reason to keep my material up on a website where the editors consistently treated me rudely.

Buzzle's Performance

Buzzle has a cute logo of a bee, and a catchy slogan: "Intelligent life on the web.". But I found it fell short of its image.

I used Buzzle primarily as a way of letting people know about a tea rating and review website I designed, RateTea. I have found that Buzzle's performance in terms of driving traffic to my websites lagged behind that of EzineArticles, but was significantly higher than that of other article directories. The click-through rate has hovered around 2%, in contrast to EzineArticles where it has always averaged over 5%.

The number of views per article on Buzzle has been fairly high, for a typical article, slightly higher than EzineArticles. This fact, combined with the lower click-through rate, makes me wonder if Buzzle is including duplicate views or views from automated web crawlers in their statistics. I also noticed that traffic from Buzzle was a bit slow to roll in, in contrast to EzineArticles, which provided an immediate boost of traffic shortly after publishing new articles.

What would make it four or five stars?

Buzzle has a number of serious deficiencies that place it behind EzineArticles, which I gave 4 stars in my review.

My final recommendation:

Overall, Buzzle's performance was good, but not excellent. In terms of driving traffic, it clearly exceeded GoArticles and other less reputable article directories. Submission of articles was cumbersome and time-consuming, however, as the primitive author tools and interface required me to write the article on my own computer before copying and pasting it into the forms on Buzzle.com.

My professional opinion is that Buzzle is only worth publishing on if you've already published extensively on EzineArticles and want to diversify the sites on which you are publishing. But even then, Buzzle may be a waste of time: serious authors would be better served by moving beyond article directories and starting to write for websites with greater visibility and a stronger reputation for editorial integrity.



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