Articles for SEO
Writing articles for SEO is all the rage. Here’s how it works, or rather, how it’s supposed to work. You write an article on something you’re good at, or have more than a working knowledge of. You post said article on one of these ‘Free Article‘ sites, with a link back to your site and all is well in Gazoogleland. People get to read your expert treatise, and your website gets all sorts of lovely Page Rank and inbound traffic. Alas, as with everything, spammers up and ruin what should be a pretty good thing (I’m amazed at the amount of effort some people will expend in order to avoid doing an honest day’s work).
Take the design articles featured on our site. I wrote an article a few years back called Some Golden Rules of Logo Design - it can be found half way down our what makes a great logo page. Well, it’s all over the intertoobz. Someone called Wong Weng Chen, bogus name no doubt, has posted the piece on a free article site ezines.com. With links back to some $3 discount web hosting outfit (that’s apparently been nuked by their ISP). From there, the article has been pinched and strewn all over spam blogs (we wrote about splogs back in 1996), with a links to everything from Viagara, to Sub-prime mortgage sites. No credit to the original source. No linky (though with the cornocupia of spam links, probably not such a bad thing). Trouble is, the original page has been devalued by Big G as duplicate content (a search engine no-no) and dropped from its normal ranking spot. Now, I could spend the entire day sending DMCA Takedown notices, but that would take me away from more productive tasks, and to what end? These rips are like mushrooms - nuke one, and a dozen show up. Once again, let me introduce you to the good folks at Copyscape - a great resource for finding people who are pinching stuff from your website. Run a free search of your website URLs - what you find may surprise you. And now having completed my morning rant, we return you to our regularly scheduled blog…
Update: Despite my original misgivings, have to take my hat off to the good folks at ezines. Ten minutes after notifying them of the rip, I received an e-mail from a nice admin called Abby, telling me that the article had been removed from their server. Nicely done. 1 down. 700 to go…
