Article Submission Observations

[ADAM Web Design]

As part of the beginning of a marketing campaign I'm trying to create for a pair of my clients (very much a work in progress still), I've created two articles with a backlink to my client's site for each:

Article #1: Why Going Green Makes Good Business Sense

Article #2: When is a Website Ready for Launch?

I have been simultaneously submitting both articles to a series of article publication sites throughout the past week, something I'm not done with yet.

Now here's the interesting part:

When I query MSN to see how many sites have published the articles (by putting the first few words of each article in exact quotes), I get 35 results for Article #1 and 29 for Article #2. (I took away one because, without my knowing it, an Atlanta woman's magazine came up with an article with the exact same title).

MSN Query, Article #2

MSN Query, Article #1

On the other hand, Google has a much wider skew, with 177 results for Article #1 vs. just 14 for Article #2:
Google Query, Article #1

Google Query, Article #2

I've tried mixing up the order, submitting Article #2 second (so that it shows up as a new article), etc. And I know that Article #2 is being published elsewhere, as MSN has indicated.

I'm really not sure what exactly this means for Article #2.

I thought it might be a sandbox effect for a new article, but then Article #1 wouldn't have anywhere near as many results either.

I thought Article #1 might have been the better article, but then they're both being published in approximately the same numbers.

I'm wondering if the sites referenced in Article #1 give it more Google credibility than those in Article #2 since there are some government sites and OBLs that have been around longer. But that's just a shot in the dark.

So I don't really know what to make of this.

Any thoughts?

[willthegeek]

You should have a close look at the sites that show up on the SEs.

After reading your post, I just did the same for one of my articles, Web Analytics - Getting it Right. I came up with the following:

Y - 221
M - 1,300
G - 482

I then went to check some of the links. Most on G and Y are legitimate, but some were stolen reproductions of my article giving no credit to me as the author. An example of this is the forum at forums.session9.co.uk/showthread.php?t=486. The owner had the balls to print my entire article without giving credit, thus violating my copyright. The sad part is that he (Bill) could have just re-printed the article and given me credit. He is free to do so under terms of the copyright. He still would have his own link and received acknowledgement as the poster, while I would have gained another link. I will also post to his forum and let him have a piece of my rather dirty mind.

But the all time thief is a link spammer, aka blog spammer, who has stolen the content, hidden it behind a legitimate looking page and uses it as an IBL to other spam sites. The format usually is something like lovingclown.blobspot.com or thoughtfuloutdoors.blogspot.com or pick-your-own-name.blogspot.com. There are many of them.

These people steal your content and then point the link to their own sites to gain inbound links. They don't care that nobody can click on the link. They only want the SE to log it as an inbound link.

Short of reporting them to the SEs, I am not sure what can be done.

HTH

Will

PS: As an aside, only 8 of the several hundred sites that post my articles is listed as an inbound link. The same is true of directory listings of my site from the search directories. These listings have been on many of these sites for well over a year, so I can't understand why they are not indexed and listed by G. But then, who can figure out G?

[ADAM Web Design]

willthegeek: interesting, and it's certainly something I've considered in the process of the article submission process.

But...the way I look at it, for every idiot like that, there are at least 10-15 people who will take my article and use it the way I intended it (as a "linkware" article).

Some people (e.g. Corey Bryant from right here at WPW...big up to Corey) have taken the time to link directly to articles on my site while not only giving me credit for writing it, but complimenting the article and various aspects of it.

So chasing down the odd loser who might take my article and claim it as his own just isn't worth it. Eventually, these guys end up either getting found out or moving on to something else anyway, and with a fairly expansive distribution of all of my articles already, it doesn't really concern me all that much.

Besides, article submission isn't the only way I promote sites.

I do appreciate your comments and thoughts; don't get me wrong or anything like that. It's a valid point. It's just that the amount of time and energy it would take to launch any kind of action on these people vs. the net gain of doing so just doesn't work out in my favour.

[nuttymarketer]

hey guys,

Com'on. We should concentrate only on the getting our message out. These thief of article would be very difficult to catch. And Atleast we should not try to do so.

There are many Good people and website who publish the articles with the Author name and Links. So we should concentrate more on those than these unscrupulous people. As this is not going to add any type of value to our business.

As Peter Drucker said, Policing of business is a costly affair. Avoid it if it is going over the top of your value and revenue generation.

So have fun. And forget these guys. They will do it anyway. And to my best knowledge Google do not like duplicate content. So they will refine their searches more on this.

Arvind Kumar

[rondo]

Another reason you may be seeing odd results is that some of the article sites will place your article intro on their rss feeds which have very wide distribution.

I recently searched one of my unqique article titles to find over 37000 references in Google. One week later it was back down to 400.

Andrew

[ADAM Web Design]

Well...the interesting thing about it is that it seemingly corrected itself as of Wednesday. I got roughly the distribution I wanted (for now...I can always get more later).

It's just weird how one article was picked up a week after the other.

[nuttymarketer]

This is happening because site like ezinearticles.com promote your article on their distribution network and RSS. They do this very diligently. More of my articles distrubuted and published at places are sourced from www.ezinearticles.com

Other is, People steal your artcile with their name on it. They do not give you the credit for your work. Weird..yes it is, but True.

Google has put a fulter on Duplicate content. They monitor it and reduce the number of site with the same content in their SERPs. You can check it with your own new article. In first week you will have thousand of website listing with your Article Title and within next 4 week, you will only have site which will give you the credit. I have seen this happen on Google. I am not sure about MSN and Yahoo.

Arvind Kumar

[ADAM Web Design]

Arvind: I think you misunderstand my original question.

I submitted both articles simultaneously to many sites, including ezinearticles.com . Every one of them except for one accepted the article and began distributing it accordingly (RSS feeds, etc.) at the same time.

MSN picked up distribution of both articles at roughly the same levels. In fact, at the time I submitted the original inquiry, MSN was showing that it had indexed the article 15 more times than Google had, including indexing it from many sites in which I knew Google had found the other article.

So...Google was crawling the sites in question, as was MSN. Google was grabbing the second article, and a week later the first, according to the SERPs.

So the question now becomes: why did it take Google a week longer to include the places the first article was submitted than it did the second?

Both were submitted at the same time to the same sites and accepted in the same quantities. That means that the indexing should be the same as well.