Article Scams

I was writing articles for promoting websites long before it became the hot thing for SEO companies and other to promote.

Promoting your website using articles works and here is why. You write an article on a topic associated with your website's products or services. You submit that article to article submission websites that in turn offer it to webmasters as free content.

Each article contains links to your website in the footer or author bio area. That means everytime a webmaster places your article into their website, it becomes another website that links to yours.

They are probably a related link, which is even more valuable. They won't likely pick up articles that are not related to their topic.

So overall, it's a legitimate white hat approach to gaining link popularity and visibility for your website.

But as with any good thing on the web, bring on the clowns, the scammers who work harder at stealing your money than they ever would have to when earning a legitimate buck.

You violate someone's copyright by not only copying and pasting their text exactly as it was written, but even IF you reword the text using synonyms, etc.

You violate someone's copyright if their article is the ONLY source you used when writing your article, even if you completely wrote it from scratch using their article as the reference.

There are people out there selling software that rewords other people's articles. They tell you that the software does not violate copyright law. They tell you that you will be able to copyright the new article produced by the software.

Not true. An outright lie. No other way to put it.

Then there are those that are selling "packages" of articles and telling you that you can just put your name on them and submit them.

Again, they are lying to you. Article Submission Websites like Articles.pn use duplicate content software to detect when the same article is being submitted under different names. They will catch you even if you rewrite portions of the article.

You will end up being banned from ever submitting to them again. Much like trying to manipulate the search engines, article submission websites are becoming more sofisticated and they will ban you with extreme prejudice.

They rely on good original content to build up their websites. The webmasters who come to them expect to see original material. Using cheats and shortcuts hurts them and they fight back by making sure you can't ever submit to them again. Soon they will be sharing lists of banned authors. Don't screw yourself.

The only acceptable means of using articles to promote your website is to write, or have someone write, good original articles. An example of this can be found at Article Content Provider.com

Having someone write an article for you as a ghost writer is perfectly legitimate. Yes, your byline goes on the article that was written by someone else. However, you paid them to ghost write for you. You own the rights to the article, not the writer you paid. They cannot sell that same article to anyone else.

That is the only acceptable method. If someone offers to ghost write articles for you, but wants to retain some rights, or wants to be able to sell it again, or wants their links or byline in it, then you are using the wrong person to write your articles.

You pay for it, it belongs to you. Don't fall for the scams. Good articles take time and effort to write, thats why so many scammers are out there. They know people can't or won't write their own articles and may fall for the easy way out.

By Chris McElroy
More things that just piss me off