GoArticles: A Review

Rating: (2/5)

GoArticles is an article directory (http://www.goarticles.com/). The site proudly boasts "The Web's Largest Free Content Directory". However, as with most things in life, largest does not equate to best, and in this review, I will explain why I find this website is a less-than-mediocre option among article directories.

My Experience with GoArticles:

I have experimented with article marketing as a means of helping people to learn about a tea website, RateTea. Being a statistician by education, I enjoy publishing on different websites and analyzing what kinds of results such publishing generates in terms of traffic to my websites. GoArticles is one of several article directories I have experimented with, the others including EzineArticles and Buzzle. As with any websites that I publish on, I collected data and measured its performance in terms of driving traffic to my site; when the sample size was big enough, I concluded that it was not performing well and wrote this review.

Strengths / Advantages of GoArticles:

The strengths of GoArticles are few. The site has a visually pleasing and professional-looking design, and the process to sign up is straightforward. And I've found the staff is quite responsive, in terms of responding to bug reports and general feedback. For these reasons I would find it hard to give this directory fewer than 2 stars.

Weaknesses / Failures of GoArticles:

Failure to drive traffic: I have published four articles (all about tea) on GoArticles; you can read them on my author listing. As of writing this review, these articles have been viewed 332 times, according to GoArticle's internal stats. Each article has over 50 views. However, I have only received 1 single click-through on the links in the article. This gives the particularly miserable click-through rate of 0.3%.

I suspect that what this means is that the views are exaggerated...GoArticles does not clearly identify how it tallies its stats, so it may be counting duplicate views and spiders; I can't think of anything else that would explain such a low click-through rate. By contrast, on EzineArticles , my favorite article directory, my click-through rate is over 6% and the lowest on any article with over 50 views is 1.9%.
Poor editorial oversight: It's too easy to get articles accepted on GoArticles. Many spammy articles and articles with poor grammar and bad writing slip through. The average quality of articles on the site is very low.
Buggy Interface: I encountered a number of bugs while submitting articles. The bugs were annoying and caused me to lose a bit of time, although GoArticles tech support was responsive at fixing them.

In Conclusion:

I would not recommend using GoArticles, until the site administrators make fundamental changes to address some of the concerns given above. As alternatives, I recommend EzineArticles and possibly Buzzle, although Buzzle is weaker. I also recommend moving beyond article directories and using other methods, such as blogging and writing for more reputable sites.

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