Duplicate Title Penalty
The bad news: Effective immediately, we are no longer allowing duplicate title’s in any article by any author name.
The good news: Our site will be 100% unique title’s for all articles soon… setting a new standard not normally adhered to by competing article directories.
Previously we allowed duplicate titles of any article as long as it wasn’t by the same exact author name… because it’s legit that multiple authors might want to have the exact same article title, even though the body of their articles are unique.
Here’s why this change or restriction was necessary:
1) The size of our site no longer allows easy duplicate title scripts to run without crashing the servers. By going to a single unique title database design we are able to create a title index that new submissions can be compared against in real-time — allowing us to auto-reject any duplicate title before it gets submitted.
2) If you want to blame someone for this, you can thank all of the authors who submit to us via the automated service providers that send in mass duplicated articles that we spend oooooooodles of hours sifting through by hand mindlessly. Authors really need to take some responsibility when submitting to us and then submitting to those blast services that then submit to us on the authors behalf — making the author look incompetent.
3) There is some perceived value to site quality if we have 100% unique title’s content… in terms of the partnership commitment we have with the search engines (our goal to serve them useful and relevant content that makes them look good to their users).
Whenever an author attempts to submit a duplicate title article, we will be notified via email and will investigate each event. In time, we’ll begin tracking abuse and logging it in our notes for each author so we have more information to make better decisions.
An unintended consequence is going to occur from this shift: We will no longer have an easy way to identify non-exclusive rights content submitters (not wanted here) the same way we used to identify them. We have a highly complex new set of tools that we won’t be sharing with the marketplace designed to help us privately and quickly identify private label article spam…so they can be discarded.
I’m sorry we had to take away the ability for multiple authors to have the same article title, but know that this was a decision designed to protect the quality of the site for the greater good of all that use EzineArticles.com. We’re in it for the long-term and this was one of those hard choices that had to be made.
You will receive a notice during the submission process that the title you’ve selected already exists. You then have the option to change it if you choose.
January 21, 2011 at 4:51 PM[Reply]