What do Denny Waldarmo, Sarah Sandori, H.Tim Sevets and Jer Bosky have in common?
Answer: They are all clients of mine, and they are all being robbed.
Those four individuals are part of a writers consortium that I helped form. They write articles that are posted to article directories, most notably ezineArticles. Per ezineArticles’s terms, they receive no direct compensation for their writing, and other people are free to use their articles on their own web sites or ezines.
In return, Denny, Sarah, Tim and Jer (and the 65,000 other expert authors at ezineArticles) get to include an author’s information section—commonly called a “bio box”—with every article they post. Anyone who uses one of their articles is required by ezineArticles’s rules to retain that bio box.
The presence of the bio box is the main reason that most people sweat away at the keyboard cranking out articles for ezineArticles and similar directories. The bio box typically contains links back to the author’s home page or other web site with which the author is involved. If the author is selling a product or service from that web page, the bio box can generate valuable traffic—and, ultimately, income.
This, by the way, is at the heart of the so-called “Bum Marketing Method” popularized by Travis Sago. It also forms a part of the arsenal of traffic-generating techniques advocated by many of today’s make-money-online gurus, including Rob Benwell of Blogging To The Bank fame.
The other day I Googled one of my most prolific author’s names—Sarah Sandori—and was gratified to see that her articles had been picked up and used on thousands of web sites. But when I started checking some of the sites that had re-published her articles, roughly half of them had left off the bio box. So except perhaps for a minor boost in name recognition, all of those “bio box-less” impressions were doing Sarah (and our consortium) absolutely no good.
Worse, a small number of the web sites that used our authors’ articles went further than simply leaving off the bio box. They put other people’s names to the articles, or linked from within the articles to their own product marketing pages.
None of this is the fault of ezineArticles, whose terms of usage clearly state that you can’t republish articles from their site unless you include the authors’ bio boxes. I need to go back and re-read their terms; possibly they even threaten legal action against violators. In any case, ezineArticles asks its authors to contact any web site violating the terms and demand that the rules be respected (by adding the bio box, for example), or that the incorrectly posted article be removed.
The problem is that violations now number in the thousands, and that’s just for one author’s content. If this is happening for all 65,000 of ezineArticles’s contributors, then it has grown out of hand.
A large proportion of the scofflaw sites that I found appear to be “scraped”—that is, sites generated by automated scripts that go out on the web, grab content from here, there and everywhere, and churn out junk pages by the tens of thousands. It’s like a crime wave that has gone beyond the ability of anyone to effectively police.
Now, even given the existence of so many robot-created web sites, the fact of course remains that there is a human being behind every one of them. Domain registration information, including contact info, is public record, although there are ways to hide the identities of the real people who are involved. I’ll certainly be contacting as many of the scofflaws as I can, though how many will either correct their sites to conform to the rules of this game—or else remove them completely—remains to be seen.
How do other writers, or their agents, handle this? Do others agree that this is a growing problem? Can the article directory sites do anything beyond what they are already doing to enforce their terms of usage?
Let’s discuss.
P.S: I hereby give permission for anyone who wishes to republish this article, provided that a link back to this site’s main page (Banking On The Blog) or to this specific post is included.
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