Articlesbase.com Where Art Thou?

Articlesbase is gone, a giant in its niche that goes out with a whimper?

You know about 2 weeks ago I was Googling and I decided to check up on Articlesbase to see how it was going. At first the website just hung for about 3 – 5 minutes, then a Cloudflare badly cached version eventually loaded up about 10% of the site. I was left wondering what the heck is going on here, are they restarting or upgrading their server? Thinking it was just a mundane task that was the cause of this downtime, I decided to leave it for a few hours.

Later when I tried again and was met with the same Cloudflare response I became more curious? I did a Google for articlesbase.com to view any recent developments and there was nothing, even on the popular webmaster forums. So I checked there Facebook and I was greeted with this message:

“It is with great sadness that we have taken the decision to close down Articlesbase after 11 years of trading.

The website has not been able to recover from many google updates in which the previous owners did not foresee and adapt in time. Since taking over we have tried everything to re-align the website with Googles best practises to see if the site has any chance to recover.

The final blow was issued this month when Google Adsense closed the account without any warning or notice, cutting off the only income stream and once again showing the Google is not a friend of the website.

We thank everyone for their contribution to the website over the long trading history and hope you continue to find innovative ways to share your content. [Source]”

Damn...that sucks. What also sucks is that such a giant in the world of the internet can just disappear over night and I could not find a whisper of it on the internet. Well I just wanna say to Articlesbase:

“Thanks for all the work you have done and all the time you have spent filtering through all those spam filled articles to find the most worthy of publishing, you will be missed.”

So it turns out the reason of the closure was because Google Adsense blocked their Adsense account because of duplicate content. For anyone who has the same type of website as Articlesbase, there is two lessons to be understood from this:

Don't use Google Adsense for your article directory if you rely on it for an income on other websites. Make sure you build your website with a script (like Drupal, Joomla and even Wordpress) that is easily built upon like, inhouse advertising, premium accounts or a marketplace so you aren't solely relying on external ad revenue.


Plus if you think about it most of the people who use article directories are pretty savvy when it comes to tech, so an ad blocker on their browser is something that they would most likely have, so ads in javascript format should be avoided if possible and HTML should be used.

Advertisements like Adsense can make webpage look disgusting when they are used too much, but sometimes they can fit in when used sparingly. Although I did like the new Articlesbase layout which was updated last year I think.

I also noticed Streetarticles.com is gone too and I have heard many people praise it for its service but I would not know seeing as my articles got rejected from that site, due my preferred subject.

Any way back to the main topic of this article, Articlesbase I am sure you will be back again somehow, as you have a well established visitor base. Until then thanks for the service.

EDIT: Articlesbase is back from the dead as of 07/04/2017. New owners i presume and new look and possibly built on a new framework. Looks good! You can see the new website here.

Edit: The site has been dropped as of 12/09/2017.

I have created a top 5 list of the most popular article directories on the net, have a look.

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