How Not To Do Article Marketing or How To Get Your Account Banned
By 
ArticleSnatch • November 15, 2007
Article Marketing is the writing of articles, usually about 400 words or so that provide useful information to your reader and then submitting them to one or several article directories. Article directories are happy to accept these articles as it gives them more content to share with their readers and the other publishers who come to their site to find new articles for other uses. Unfortunately there are a lot of people out there who try to abuse these sites. While running ArticleSnatch I have caught a fair number of abusers, but more importantly the readers of the site have caught more and brought them to our attention.
What types of abuse do we catch?
- Plagiarism:
- Artificial hit increases:
- Too many links in the resource box:
- Links in the body of the article:
- Articles that are too short:
- Articles that contain inappropriate content:
This is using someone else’s work, without their consent, and usually word for word. Sometimes it is a sentence or just the theme of the article. But most often it is the entire article. This is very hard for article directory owners to pick up on, so the thief often gets away with it. However authors will notify us of the situation and let us know that it is stolen so we can look into it. Today alone we removed over 600 plagiarized articles that were submitted by one person during the last 2 months.
Most article directories have a page for Popular Articles like this one. This is created based on the number of times a page is loaded. Some malicious users will artificially increase this number through various tactics to get their articles on the popular articles page. How do you check - simple - use another analytics software. Sure there will be some differences due to what is recorded (robots or humans) but if the site says it has had 8000 hits and the analytics says 10 - you know that there is something going on. We have removed several authors for this as well.
While some directory owners have a script that will catch this, others do not. More often than not it is caught by someone seeing it and reporting it to the editor. Most authors who include more links than allowed in a resource box do so intentionally and on all of their articles.
Links in the body of the article are easily caught with a simple script or query. However many are done tastefully others - not so much. If these are allowed by the directory to which you are submitting - feel free - but know that most directory owners do not allow links in the body of the article. Try to use no more than 1 link per 200 words of content in the body of the article if allowed at all. We remove articles all the time because of links in the body of the article. Often without notice to the author. If you violate a sites Terms and Conditions - do not expect second chances.
We remove all articles that are deemed to be of insignificant content and of little value. For example a small 70 word sales pitch will be declined instantly. Isnare recently changed their policy to a 500 word minimum. Other sites have increased it to requiring 400 or 500 or even more. Long story short - write some useful content that is longer than a sales pitch so that the reader can get a feel for what you know.
All article directories have the rules about what they will accept and what they won’t. Most however do not allow articles promoting online pharmacies, casinos, drug use, and other illegal activities. Adult content is also usually not allowed. You should check the policy of each site before submitting. Remember it is easy for a site owner to search for a word or words across an entire site for either words that are inappropriate or links that are inappropriate. Some sites will remove all of the articles from an author if they find some of them are inappropriate.
Just to recap - don’t spam, don’t abuse directories and write quality articles that are actually useful to the reader - not just a sales pitch for your product or service.
Have a great day!
Matt Ellsworth
MJE Sales, LLC
ArticleSnatch Admin
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[...] » How Not To Do Article Marketing or How To Get Your Account Banned - ArticleSnatch Blog Article Marketing is the writing of articles, usually about 400 words or so that provide useful information to your reader and then submitting them to one or several article directories. Article directories are happy to accept these articles as it gives t (tags: article-marketing article-directory articlesnatch abuse plagiarism artificial-hits fake-articles plagiarized-articles) [...]
I want to learn about Article marketing and this text is very informative
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@ilkaaaycaevik - I’m glad to hear that - article marketing has helped me as well as a lot of others gain the links and the page views they need.
I take alot of time and effort writing articles. Although i haven’t been doing it for very long, i do enjoy it, and i always try to make them as interesting and informative as possible. So it angers me when people plagiarise and stuff their articles with links. If people stuck to the rules article sites would be a better source of interesting information.
Thanks for your insight - next time you leave a comment - if you wouldn’t mind using your name - that would be great. Thanks!
Great article. thanks for the tips. I dont know much about article marketing but iget to know lot from this post.once again thanks and good luck !
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Excellent advice Matt
As the owner of a new and only small article directory it has become a huge task to wade through an absolute flood of rubbish to find a handful of genuinely well written articles.
My aim, in an attempt to distinguish myself from hundreds of other general directories, has been to try and ensure quality content that publishers will actually want to use.
Article marketing has never been about link building but it’s been twisted by certain people and the result has done nothing but damage the whole premise of article directories and marketing.
I would welcome capable new authors with open arms, as opposed to those who submit poorly written ad copy.
Hopefully some of your readers might like to check us out
@Maurice - thanks for stopping by.
The plagarism thing really bothers me. I happened on an article of mine that someone had stolen and then obviously modified using some kind of software that automatically converted words to their synonyms. Ended up with something that was totally unreadable. And to make things worse, I think they kept the author resource box, but they had so completely modified the article, there is no way that I would want it associated with me.
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@daniel - You benefit from link building - which is where the resource box comes in. But you also benefit by building yourself as an expert on a field or topic. If you share with people your knowledge - they will be more likely to visit your site. My comment is specifically about authors who submit useless junk with 80 links in it…
@scott - Thats called article spinning (and done poorly - obviously). Thats the kind of person you need to speak to. Our Terms state that they have to leave it as is to use it and use it in full.
Thanks for the tips Matt. I am fairly new to article marketing so just getting my strategy worked out at the moment
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Great tips! Unfortunately, the spammers will keep on doing what they do making it harder for us who perserve with creating quality articles.
@diane - that they sure do.
@scott - thats because they pull the rss feed from the article directory to which you submit. Thats usually allowed as part of the terms of the article directory. Even though you view it as bad - the more links to an article the more powerful those links to your sites are. Thats why its important to make sure that you use the 3 links (if allowed) in the resource box.
We don’t allow any links in the article summary (as it messes up other scripts). We don’t allow links in the body because of spammers. If an author could do it tastefully - it wouldn’t be an issue. But the fact is - if you allow it - then quickly you will find articles with more links than non linked text.
In order to fight spam we use a lot of automated tools that search for links in the body.
Your best bet is to not get frustrated but keep creating useful articles and distributing them all over.
The first one is quite shocking to me. I can’t believe that
someone get away by submitting 600 over such kind of articles
by stealing people’s work.
People who make fake views are also people we should make
them leave. They make readers who are searching for good
content disappointed, make authors who pour in their great
effort easily over taken and cause an article directory lose
their reputation.
Am a freelancer on net and recently I entered into a project where I sholud find copy writing projects for a writer. T am just charging him 10% of the total project money and fairly going well ..it is just a week and 4 articles.
Now am worrying after reading this article…Is he following ethical ways or not.
Thanks for the valuable information I will discuss with him the things.
Hi,
interesting read, thanks for that. Can you please tell me though, if you submit an article to be published can you still have it published on your own site? Or is it like guest posting where you are supposed to not publish on your own page?
@jackmo - you can usually publish things on most article directories that you have written and published elsewhere. For example - article marketer - an article submission service - submits your article to over 1000 directories. The best thing about that - is that you are reaching out to all the user bases of those sites.
Came across your blog the other day. Looking to hone in my article skills and increase the output of articles I write. Good read. To avoid duplicate content penalties, should I slightly change the wording of an article I wrote and submitted to an article directory if I were to publish the same article on my site? Thanks!
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That or other way it is one of the ways to solve problem:)
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To me, article marketing is too time consuming. If the search engines counter each article as 1 link ever if its duplicate content than i would feel better about it.
I am new to article marketing as well…there are good tips here that I will try too. I don’t appreciate running in to junk articles out there and since I am new I want to make sure I am doing this the right way to start.
Great list Matt. Plagiarism is hardest to moderate. We have had a number of incidents of plagiarism at article-content-king too. Those thinking of doing this should think twice. It’s very easy for the person to prove it is there copyright, and also very easy to identify the person who breached it. I think the maximum fine for this is $150,000 per incidence.
Not really worth it is it… no matter how good the article you steal is, it’s not going to make enough to pay that fine.
Dan
excellent article.
Thank you!
that is great, I often wonder if blogs are just copied and pasted from smaller sites that are not as good at marketting.