Could be hazardous to your good name.
A few months ago, I read a blog post by some A-list pro blogger that briefly discussed eZineArticles.com as a place to publish articles and generate hits for your site. The idea was that the articles contained a byline with links and people who read them would come back to your site to read more. The result: more hits.
I dug deeply into my well of content and found a handful of articles I didn’t mind republishing. I formatted them as required and submitted them to eZineArticles.com, after setting up an account as an author. A bunch of the articles were bounced back because they read like blog posts. But I successfully argued that they did provide useful information in my somewhat conversational and bloggish writing style. All five articles were published on the eZine Articles site.
First Surprise: Anyone Can Republish!
What I didn’t realize at first was that anyone who sets up a publisher relationship with eZineArticles.com could republish my work, as long as it was republished exactly as written and included my byline, bio, and links. I discovered this when an article I wrote about flying at sunrise was picked up by a Web site with content about cruising.
After a few e-mails went back and forth between me and the site owner and eZineArticles support staff, I realized what I’d missed by not reading the fine print — I was basically granting a very broad set of rights to eZineArticles.com. But the site that had used the piece was a high quality site and I didn’t mind my recycled work appearing there. And the eZineArticles folks assured me that publishers had to meet certain requirements to use the work.
Second Surprise: Hot Sex?
But I wasn’t very happy when I traced a link to one of my Antelope Canyon photos article to a Blogger blog with the words “hot-sex” in its domain name. Although the site didn’t appear to contain any porn, I didn’t want my content — or name! — associated with it. So I wrote to eZineArticles support to complain.
Today, I found the same article used on a site with “nurse-fetish” in the domain name. Now I was pissed. I wrote again to the eZineArticles staff.
eZineArticles.com Responds
My new message crossed their response to the first one in the ether. In their response, they told me that if I didn’t want my work on a specific site, it was my responsibility to contact the owner of that site and ask him to remove it.
Ever try to contact the owner of a Blogger blog? It’s not possible if they don’t want to make it possible.
I replied that their response was completely unsatisfactory and that I would be deleting all of my articles from their site.
And then I did.
Lessons Learned
I am certainly not desperate enough to be published or to get hits by releasing my work on a site that allows distribution without prior approval by the author. Frankly, I don’t think any author should be that desperate.
eZineArticles.com obviously doesn’t give a damn about its authors if it won’t work to prevent this kind of activity with an author’s work. Any author who publishes with them deserves whatever shit he gets — including his name spread around on sites of questionable quality and purpose.
From now on, I will publish my work electronically in only three places:
- Here, on this site, where my work is covered by a copyright notice that helps protect my work from misuse.
- On the sites of publishers who pay me for my efforts and protect our copyrights.
- On the sites of other bloggers who have asked me to guest author for them and will protect our copyrights.
I’m angry about this, but I know it’s my own fault. I was conned, first by the pro blogger who pushed eZineArticles.com and then by eZineArticles.com itself. I don’t understand why anyone would allow their work to be reproduced in a way that they cannot control. Could they all be as stupid as I was when I signed up?
As for the “hot-sex” and “nurse-fetish” sites, I wonder how the other female eZineArticles authors feel about their work — and their names — appearing there.
10 responses so far ↓
1 Jonathan Bailey // Sep 7, 2007 at 1:37 pm
Sadly, none of this is surprising to me. I’ve been noticing an uptick in the number of spam bloggers using Ezinearticles.com to grab content. I would definitely advise anyone who wants their work to be distributed to avoid the site and, instead, use Creative Commons Licensing or another form of copyleft.
EzineAritcles is just plain suicide.
2 Maria Langer // Sep 7, 2007 at 1:48 pm
What I don’t understand is why some authors have supposedly written THOUSANDS of articles there. Are these people that desperate to get published? With thousands of articles, you can build a great personal Web site. Why risk getting your content splashed all over low-quality spam sites?
3 Jonathan Bailey // Sep 7, 2007 at 2:45 pm
Maria: I think it is all a short-sighted attempt at building up Google Juice. The article and content is secondary to shooting the link out there and if spammers pick it up, so much the better.
I personally view EzineArticle as a spam operation. Users spam articles into the system to get the content picked up by other spammers on the flip side and get their link shot out all over the Web.
A true win-win for everyone involved, if you don’t mind some spam with your meal.
4 Kevin // Sep 7, 2007 at 10:02 pm
This comes as a surprised to as I’ve always been told to write and submit articles to article directories for extra traffic.
I’m not that sensitive about my articles though I don’t want my articles associated with drugs, sex or gambling.
I have a few submitted at EzineArticles so I need to go check on them.
5 Maria Langer // Sep 8, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Jonathan, in thinking about this some more, I don’t think I’d mind so much if the article was something I’d whipped up in a few minutes, didn’t care much about, and didn’t put my name on. In other words, some low quality dreck published under a pseudonym. Then I’d get the benefit of the Google Juice without getting dirty (so to speak).
I’m just wondering if I could write something like that and get it both published and picked up. It would be a good experiment when I’m done with the project I’m working on now.
6 Jonathan Bailey // Sep 8, 2007 at 5:09 pm
Sounds like a fun experiment to me! If you do it, let me know how it goes!
7 PlagiarismToday » Article Marketing: Death By Spam? // Sep 19, 2007 at 12:02 pm
[...] PT reader and published author Maria Langer found when she experimented with article marketing at Ezine Articles, there’s a lot of places that you don’t want your content and your name to [...]
8 SW Washington and Portland Small Business Blog » Blog Archive » eZineArticles.com — a Good Idea? // Nov 9, 2007 at 11:54 am
[...] You can read more at Maria’s blog. [...]
9 Albany Lawyer // Apr 6, 2008 at 3:32 pm
I think you may miss the point of ezinearticles. I have found it useful but not for the reasons you suggest, and I don’t follow your approach.
There are two main benefits, and I’ve seen both. First, people may find your writing on the ezinearticles site and follow your links to you, creating business for you. Second, having your article on a prominent site like this, with relevant links back to your site, creates link value. The excessive spam content on these sites is probably reducing the value, but it still has some benefit. One of my articles has been viewed over 15,000 times and my web site analytics show that it has referred actual business — people paying me to handle their speeding tickets.
A key problem is that it sounds like you’re submitting the same content you’ve written somewhere else. That’s not going to help you much, as search engines tend to prefer unique content, and may penalize “duplicate content.” Thus, your articles won’t be seen much and you won’t get much link value from them.
As for your content showing up on other sites, that’s not the fault of ezinearticles. You own the copyright to your content and they don’t have the power to stop others from reusing it. That’s your problem, and in my opinion at least, you’re wasting your time by worrying about it. The spam sites that are republishing your content are seen by very few people and in the long run will probably disappear.
10 Maria Langer // Apr 6, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Albany, I don’t agree with you about ezinearticles. ezinearticles LICENSES this work to others, thus legally allowing them to republish my work without my approval. Then, when it gets out there, it’s MY responsibility to track down the owner of a site with a porn name and ask for my work to be removed. Sorry, that just doesn’t fly with me. I write for a living and I’m extremely particular about where my work appears. ezinearticles doesn’t care at all. I don’t need that kind of help.
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