update: we have a temporary fix in place, by disabling the gzip output, things should be working better.

Update: – everythng is back up and running

I’m surprised that someone would have such audacity to do so.

The issue of course has been resolved, but it is still surprising to see some of the steps that some people will go through to try to get the word out about their site.

Even worse, was that Mr. Bhol didn’t even bother to include links in the resource box, rather just in the body of the article, where up till a few months ago, they would have been filtered out and not shown. Clearly he’s show his claim of 3 years experience to be kind of invalid.

Anyway enough about that guy.

The editorial team is continuing to review accounts and remove things from the site as well as keep approving the new stuff. So as always, if you have any questions feel free to comment below or email us.

Just got done fixing the site after some hacker at 5:33 EST from an ip address of 211.72.36.100 decided to hack our site and insert a random redirect code. I guess he wanted to earn a little christmas cash as well. Oh well Hackers are losers and thats that. Not much else to do right.

We have worked on securing the hole that was found to reduce the risk of that in the future. Pretty sure the hole is wordpress (thanks guys). Not that many people would be surprised by that….

The editorial team over here has been working hard as well to get more authors reviewed, but if you would like us to review your account, please send an email to webmaster AT articlesnatch Dot com. We will take a look at it.

If you haven’t logged in a while, login, check some of your links. We are not approving anyone linking to parked domains, for sale domains, or domains that redirect you to 80 different places.

If you have articles in your account that you wouldn’t want a 5 year old to read, you might want to think about removing them. We have been working to remove all content like that and sometimes people just get everything banned if there is too much bad stuff. These topics also include replica junk, pharma, online casinos, etc. If you know that you have submitted those in the past, please login and delete them.

Have a great day and look forward to hearing your feedback, feel free to coment below or email us. If you do leave a comment, don’t use a keyword as your name, we will just mark it as spam…

Well we have stopped reading these comments and just mark them all as spam. So if you want to leave a productive comment, feel free. If you are just looking for another anchor text link to your likely spam filled site, we will just mark it as spam…

that’s enough rant for now, perhaps later I’ll post about the “Entertainment” company that sent an email accusing us of copyright violations in regards to an article that they hired a firm in India to submit. So they hire out someone to write and submit the article and then accuse us of distributing copies of their film. What on earth is going on.

So far we have reviewed authors who have contributed 74000 total articles (UPDATE 12/14 9pm 108,700 articles). Our moderation team is working to get everyone reviewed, but with over 100,000 authors it is a time consuming process.

These changes have been called drastic and an over reaction, that may be true in some authors minds, but instead of over reacting, remember that the changes are TEMPORARY. Remember a link that is followed but on a page that is not in the index doesn’t matter, so pl

We have had a few injection attacks as well, currently we have caught injections from astralarena.com and atsignart.com, if you see something that doesn’t look right, or acts funny, notify us immediately so our staff can take a look.

We are working to remove the nofollow from every legitimate author on the site that might have gotten mixed in the with the bad.

Find something that looks like it doesn’t belong on the site, contact us and we will take a look.

Got a suggestion or want to see something new? send us an email or reply below, be sure to read the comment policy.

We can now review your account, note whether your write quality content and link to quality sites – if so – then the nofollow will be removed from your links. If you write terrible articles, and link to bad neighborhoods, etc, then we can mark the account as reviewed and leave the nofollow in place.

Currently we are reviewing authors based on the number of articles submitted, as well as the date of the last login. So authors who are submitting articles regularly will be reviewed first. If you would like to skip the queue, please feel free to email us at webmaster at articlesnatch dot com. (piece that back together.)

This will also remove the nofollow from your profile page — you did take the time to edit your profile right? You are allowed several links there and several paragraphs of space for you to write whatever you want about you and your company, etc. That profile page is linked from every article you submit, so its likely a good idea to get that filled out.

We are working on an option for you to opt out of having the in text ads from showing up on your site – these are the ads served by kontera within the body of the article. If you would like them blocked from your account, we can take note of that, and we are working to get it implemented shortly. If there is just one advertiser you want to see blocked, email us and we can take a look at that as well.

New Feature: Automagically Converting Urls to Links

We have turned on a function that will take a url in the resource box and turn it into a link, so if you forget to include the actual html code for your url, the system will turn it into a link on rendering. This will only work if your url looks something like http://www.articlesnatch.com it won’t work without the http.

As always we are open to feedback and making improvements to the site, email us, leave a comment, etc. Remember we have a comment policy.

We are also running w3 total cache, but experimenting with using its built in memcached funcationalities to cache database queries.

Just uploaded WP Minify as well as a test to combine and minify js/css files before sending them to users. I’m not sure if its a good thing or a bad thing yet. Before we were running just a minify function of the w3 total cache.

Lets see how it goes, thoughts comments?

Traffic to the site has increased (global traffic has increased sharply) and is back to more than it was before the filter was applied at the end of august.

A lot of moderating has taken place with thousands of articles removed. Oddly enough only one person has contacted us and asked us why their articles promoting an online casino were removed. articles linking to online casinos aren’t allowed plain and simple (but we are looking to creating a space for them either here or on another site).

We have caught and removed several large spammers – but i’m sure more will still show up to fill their shoes.

If your reading this and you have noticed that all of your articles are suddenly gone when you try to find them, feel free to email us and we will be happy to discuss your situation with you case by case. Some people had articles removed because of bad email addresses, linking to questionable neighborhoods, etc.

The growth we have seen in the last month is causing us to expand to some new hardware as well, this will help the site continue to be able to handle the traffic in addition to improve the stability and accessibility of the site.

We have started testing some new ad formats — if you have feed back about any of the ads on the site, please email us or use the contact form, we would love to hear thoughts and opinions on them.

Thats all for now — back to work on some more changes for the site. feel free to leave comments & thoughts here.

I don’t really if ever go to McDonald’s but i know other drive thru places quite often screw up orders. Every time something is messed up you have to stop and say “is it worth going back for” – was it messed up because the employees just made a mistake – or was it intentional?

Thoughts comments?

I’m quite thrilled about this, I’ve been waiting for something neat to come out that doesn’t run on the AT&T network — around here its garbage — as is T-Mobile (which I understand works great in california) – but not in many other places. Sure there are always Blackberry’s to go to, but some of the things that Android can do are pretty cool.

While this may not be the end all to the Iphone – it sure might make some headway for all those who are frustrated with AT&T’s data network under performing. Or those who have just been waiting to enjoy their friends and family plan with a cool phone as well.

Let see what happens.

We have removed over 10,000 articles by authors who also promoted these sites. Most of these articles were not actually about the health related topics – and that’s why our editors missed them.

If we found an author who had submitted several articles with links to pharmacies, all articles were removed – in total that was over 10,000 articles. How many of them actually linking to the pharmacies, we do not know.

So if you are an author who is legitimate and you aren’t just trying to pull the wool over the sheep’s eyes, feel free to login to your account, if you feel that we have wrongly removed your articles, just email us and we will be happy to discus your situation further.

We are going to continue our clean up and crack down on inappropriate and poorly written content. If you would like to help save us some time, login and delete things that perhaps you shouldn’t have submitted in the first place. Additionally If you are unsure about something, just email us.

Thanks!

PS — happy to report – increased traffic started saturday.

So far we have removed a lot of things that I’m not sure why or how they got approved in the first place.

All of the stuff that is being removed that is inappropriate and not so family friendly will be saved, not deleted. In the future if we open up an adult only article directory those articles will be the basis of such. We have no immediate plan in place at this time for said directory but have kicked the idea around before.

So in the mean time, anyone submitting adult related, pornographic, online casino related, penis enlargement related things, please just stop.

Also to all those trying to sell “replica” items for $200 that are no better than the $10 knock offs in china town — please stop taking advantage of the public. As we continue to find your sites we will continue to remove all articles related to them and every article attached to that user. So if you have submitted these types of things in the past and you don’t want to see every article you have submitted get removed, please login and delete those articles from your account.

While someone who has submitted one or two inappropriate articles likely won’t have their account banned – we work just like Google does in some aspects, its all about percentages… so if you have more than a certain percentage of junk in your account, we wave goodbye to all of them.

Google Slap

Toward the end of august we noticed a drastic reduction in the amount of traffic coming to the site from Google. Doing some research led us to see that we also were no longer ranking for several key factors. We sent out feelers to several people to see if anyone had any answers to this, of course no one had a concrete go fix A and you will result B. We heard everything from its due to interlinking to spam to buying links to just “regular algorithm changes” to read the webmaster forum, to linking to affiliate programs. We put into place a few of those things, but I still had the feeling that it wasn’t any of those, especially not the algorithm change – articlesnatch.com should rank for the term articlesnatch (rather than a million crappy your site is worth $5500352345235 sites).

After a month of trying to figure out exactly what happened and 2 reinclusion requests being submitted and processed (with very vague answers), making various changes including removing some hacked hidden links into another blog, I remembered Andy Beard and started chatting with him. Together we drummed up a plan that hopefully will remove the Google Slap and restore the ArticleSnatch back into the site. Below I will layout the plan and follow up later with what the results have been.

The Plan

• Expand the number of posts on a topic page to allow for easier finding of the articles
• Add rel=nofollow to all outbound links from articles (I know I can hear you groaning, but wait)
• Fix other redirect, canonical and indexing issues
• Improve the usability of the rss feeds
• Remove some obviously spam articles – like the bunch from a company that included numbers in each of their pen names – nice waste of 7,000 articles from 5,000 “authors” guys – Zapped. (Working on better system to catch it sooner)
• Put on a happy face! Just kidding

Changes unrelated but made at this time

• Moved js-kit.com comment script to the last line of the code, so if their servers are running slow or lagging, it shouldn’t block the page load.
• Removed another Google FriendConnect module that wasn’t doing much but taking up space
• Added related youtube videos to the bottom of each article, stick around and watch some – its pretty fun
• Improved tracking and monitoring for article spam

Of course there is a lot more to it than just that, but thats the meat and potatoes of it.

Rel=nofollow – probably one of the most debated subjects out there. Google says to build as if search engines weren’t in existance, if we did that, then everyone could freely link to other sites that they had monetary interests in and sell ad space, link space, keyword space and whatever else they wanted to. However Google also says to add nofollow to other sites you own, affiliate programs, paid links (which you shouldn’t have anyway), sites you don’t trust and a few other things as well. In June Google changed how they treat the “page rank” from passing to nofollow links, and how it affects PageRank Sculpting, so there is less of a reason to use it on internal links. Noindex might be what you want if you want something to not show up. David Leonhardt even ran a test to see which search engines did what with a nofollow.

Mixx recently got filtered (penalty) and decided to add rel=nofollow. Digg took some protective measures before being penalized and Digg has been commended by Matt Cutts for their action, so thats a good sign.

Twitter has it on almost every link across the board, these sites all being affected shows that its a pretty serious penalty to be linking to sites you know nothing about. Twitter also removed our account in July as well and has yet to respond to any email requests, not bad for a $1 billion company.

From a SEO perspective some say that you should only build followed links, others say that you should not worry about it and build all kinds of links, and others say forget about the links, write good content and others will pick it up and reference it and the links will come naturally. The good content theory is probably the most sound, it worked for some major sites, however it really only worked after they had a following and people were happy to link to them. If you had a group of people as happy to link to your company as they are to link to wikipedia, then I’m sure you wouldn’t worry about links either.

So where do we stand, as of now we have added rel=nofollow on all links in author resource box. We have also stopped filtering out the links that are in the article body, so those links are now present, but nofollowed. Since you weren’t supposed to have submitted articles with links in the body as per our Terms, that’s just a bonus. Remember if an article gets no traffic, whats the difference how the link is? Also many articles end up getting “buried” in a sites architecture and rarely see the light of day, we are working on improving this as well. We think the increased visability some of our changes make will help get more viewers to read your articles.

Remember our editors are only human, we unfortunately do not have millions of visitors every day clicking thumbs up and down and saying this is lame, remove it, etc, although we do have a rating system, so feel free to use it. This change is NOT permanent. We are going to be reviewing authors and looking at the sites they link to. Those are writing quality articles and linking to quality sites, we will be removing the rel=nofollow from their links.

We are also looking at implementing the Google Safe Browsing API to check for bad links when the article is submitted.

We have already started reviewing authors based on what they are writing about, quality and the sites they are linking to. We will continue to do this as well in the upcoming weeks. Authors who have been approved will have the rel=nofollow removed from their resource_box links. We have also upped the removal of undesirable content, so if you have been submitting that (doubtful your reading this), and you login to your account and can’t find things, thats probably way.

Some other changes have taken place that at first we thought caused it, these included a few bugs with the new platform causing too much non changing content between pages, titles on pages all being the same and blocking robots from the wrong things. In late July we implemented a number of changes that improved the load time of the site as well as improvements to the usability of the site. Several of these changes had been long in the making and others were after speaking to some other site owners.

These changes included

• Implemented Google Ad Manager for improved ad targeting as well as faster ad serving.
• Added a feature for authors to select a default language that you would like to view the site in, one of 47 languages
• Moved translated pages to subdomains based on language instead of folders, added more caching to reduce the number of queries for translation, to improve page load time.
• Added a feature so authors can now submit articles in any of 47 languages and they will be machine translated back to english thanks to Google Translate
• Improved page build times, reduced load on server and some other technical things you probably don’t care about
• Added memcached to reduce the number of queries that mysql has to answer, a 75% reduction.
• Several other minor changes that allow for greater customization down the road
• Improved article statistic and logging

After over a month of work and several late nights trying to get these changes, they are ready to be pushed out to the live server. We will continue to fix things as they arrise and hopefully we can get out the google penalty box – this isn’t hockey!

Any questions, comments, feedback, suggestions? Please reply below.

UPDATE:
I think based on reading some of the comments that authors maybe confused about the nofollow policy, this is temporary until we can figure out what caused the penalty as well as who is linking to bad neighborhoods. After we get all of the bad neighbors out of here – and we removed several thousand of them yesterday alone – we will be adding things back slowly to trusted authors.

Also for those who have submitted articles across various topics, including some less than scrupulous ones, may I suggest that you go into your account and delete them. We recently removed all the articles from someone based on a few bad ones, come to find out she had 4400 articles. Now hopefully she will reply our email – but hasn’t yet. Either she can login and remove the bad stuff, or wait in line while an editor works on it, and then have the non bad ones reactivated.

For those who may have noticed pen names with a number in them and them gibberish – we’ve removed 6,000 of those articles as well. anyone see anything you think should be removed – please email us a link.

Update (10/2/2009):
We have found the first hidden link – I’m ashamed to admit that it exists, but now that I have found one, the hunt can begin to look for more. This person used some elements to hide the link, we found some new things to search for thanks to a post from 2007 on mattcutts blog.

In case you are wondering who was the first one we found — anandaapothecary – no I won’t be adding their .com here nor their link.
Another one found – Spencer Hunt – linking to his profile on EzineArticles.com – some “expert” he is.

Update (10/3/2009):
The first signs of some increased traffic from google have showed (thank you)

Update (10/4/2009):
Removed a lot of articles that were linking to online pharmacies, then went a step further and removed all articles by all authors who linked to an online pharmacy — were you affected? Want the legitimate articles added back – email us so an editor can take a look.

Update (10/5/2009):
Removed more articles from people with bouncing email addresses and duplicate submissions. If you notice that you have submitted an article more than once, login and delete the duplicate. If we notice, you will have all articles disabled until you fix the problem.

And he's just posted an incredibly useful list of 69 Free (or low cost) Tools to Improve Your Website.

(I should disclose that I'm mentioned in the 69th listing, which is for Market Motive, but so are Avinash Kaushik, John Marshall, Todd Malicoat, Matt Bailey, and Jennifer Laycock, who are also members of the Market Motive faculty.)

So, check out the complete list of low-cost and free tools. Yes, yes, you'll find ones like Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer, that you already knew about. But there are plenty of others that I'd never heard about before.

And while you are visiting Eisenberg's new blog, let him know if there are other free (or low cost) tools that should be added to the list. Hey, improving your website is hard, so we want to know as many options as possible.

Oh, and if you come to SES Chicago 2009, thank Eisenberg in person. You can't miss him. He's the New York Yankees fan being interviewed by the Boston Red Sox Nation citizen in the video below.

Bryan Eisenberg, Future Now, at SES London 2008 on SEO

But you'll have to hurry. The deadline for the contest is next Tuesday, October 6, 2009 at 11:59pm EST.

You'll need to use Google SketchUp to design your building and then upload it to the Google 3D Warehouse to enter. Learn more about the contest rules here.

Monopoly City Streets, which launched earlier this month, uses Google Maps for its interactive game.

Seth also spent time at eBay, where he managed APIs & Platform. Before that, he launched Gap's online stores. Seth began his career at NASA.

"Shashi is unmatched in the industry as an innovator with an outstanding track record of developing new and better ways to serve advertisers on the Web," said Jeff Levick, President of Global Advertising and Strategy at AOL. "As we move forward on our strategy of becoming the world's largest provider of display advertising, Shashi will play a critical role in creating the best products in the business for our advertising partners."

Seth is the latest of the fresh talent to head to AOL. Earlier this year, Tim Armstrong left Google to head up the struggling internet company. A few weeks ago, news came that ex-Yahoo! Brad Garlinghouse of "Peanut Butter Manifesto" fame is joining AOL as well.

If you're not familiar, Google Wave is a collaborative tool that features real-time features. They're still working on features, including group definitions, draft mode and permissions.

Those who can expect an invite are developers who participated in an earlier preview, the first people to sign up for invites and select Google Apps customers.

One ad appears at the top of the search results and two ads appear at the bottom. Take a look:

Noticeably missing from the announcement is the inclusion of Windows Mobile phones, a curious exclusion in the wake of the recently struck Microsoft-Yahoo! search deal.

Some of the keywords included in the PSA effort are:

• foreclosure rescue
• mortgage foreclosure
• fix my credit
• credit repair
• money transfer

When a searcher clicks on one of the PSA search ads, they will see a landing page with warnings about scams related to the keyword. The FTC hosts the landing pages for credit repair and mortgage foreclosure while a landing page for avoiding advanced fee fraud is hosted by Microsoft.

"In its simplest form, our real-time audience quality tracking capabilities make it possible for publishers and ad networks to immediately block bad site visitors from seeing ads, and show the right ads to the real buyers," said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. "This instantaneous audience quality determination is an important step in transforming the results that search, display and social ad providers deliver to their clients."

The new capabilities were built with a RESTful web service API that integrates into existing high-volume ad network infrastructures. As a result, it takes less than 10 milliseconds for Click Forensics' platform can score requests and process requests. This means traffic quality can be determined before an advertiser is charged for a click.

All of this is also the basis for a new real-time scoring engine in development at Click Forensics. The scoring engine will help advertisers and publishers making decisions about ad-serving based on traffic quality.