Author Overoptimizing

A handful of authors are over-optimizing their articles by continuously editing them to change the link. I’d say it’s about 100-150 out of 7000 authors that cause 90% of this over-optimizing phenom…

We never mind the labor investment to re-review an article that was edited by an author to improve grammar, spelling, sentence structure, fix a mistake, etc… but it’s heading into the high hundreds and soon thousands of dollars of labor per month to just re-review articles that were only edited to manipulate the link for some profit motive.

How can we allow any author to edit their article for free to improve any grammatical mistake while charging authors a fee to be able to edit their article for profit purposes?

Posted by on June 12, 2005 at 6:56 am | 1,769 views

6 Comments »


1
Gary Cordingley writes:

Few thorny problems have easy solutions, but this one might be an exception. How about charging according to the number of links changed? An editorial change that didn’t involve links would be free. Then the authors who made changes to improve text quality wouldn’t have to pay the freight for those trying to game the system for profit.

Comment provided June 12, 2005 at 8:35 AM

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2
Ken writes:

How about just an even $1 per edit. Might curb some of the silly edits and also let you make up lost revenue.

Comment provided June 13, 2005 at 12:06 AM

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3
Chris Knight writes:

Gary,

The idea did cross our minds to charge for any links that were added or edited…but the challenge here is that there are so many variations of URL’s used..

Even if we were able to detect every form of link style used, doing this would encourage authors to move their resource box sales pitches to the article body (where we don’t want to see sales pitches).

We’ll wait till July to address this issue as we’re training new staff members this month to help take the project to the next level.

Comment provided June 13, 2005 at 2:53 PM

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4
Adam writes:

One problem I had that I wasn’t aware of, and tried to look for in the TOS and everywhere else, was that you can only have 3 links with the whole article, including bio.

I wasn’t had no idea and I must’ve sent me article for re-review a dozen times before I figured that out.

Comment provided June 13, 2005 at 5:47 PM

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5
Jeanette Joy Fisher writes:

Chris,

When I was madly submitting articles to hit 100, you used my same author bio for all of my articles. I understand why you did this. I’ve been slowly fixing them so the call to action matches the correct website.

I’ll be happy to pay for you for this privilege.

Thanks for EzineArticles. Since my articles have been posted here, I’ve been on TV, radio (including Bloomberg News), in magazines, newspapers, called by universities with teaching offers,… All of these contacts were unsolicited by me and happened as a result of my articles.

The only problem is, I’m too busy to write articles!

Comment provided June 16, 2005 at 11:20 PM

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6
Saundra L Washington writes:

I like Ken’s idea. Perhaps, a button can be added that would ask for the type of review being request (typo’s, urls, title change, etc). Maybe a statement could be added that certain types of re-review requests may incur a small fee due to…

Comment provided June 17, 2005 at 6:04 AM

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