Hmmm…interesting that you found this blog entry…

Jill had not disclosed who the Author was (and if she did, I would not have disclosed it anyway as I want to keep a positive tone in this blog).

On the day this blog entry was posted, I let Jill know privately that I answered her question in the blog.

Jill gets to remain anonymous… so this can be a positive learning thing… no hard feelings, just real-life examples help everyone to learn.

And – what I find almost incomprehensible, is the framing of the issue as it is outlined above.

My resource box, very simply, was my FULL url – with a trailing slash after the internal landing page. ( I am using a tracking program so that, I can gage where my traffic is emanating from.

Jill’s blog, a seemingly popular site, had MY article on the front page of the site, as a “featured” post of the day/week/ or similar – and the URL in the resouce box, was NOT working. Without the trailing slash, it simply rendered a page not found error, outside of my wordpress CMS. My name, was also spelled wrong, but…who cares, right?

I sent a SIMPLE and GRACIOUS note, letting Jill know I enjoyed her site content, and that the link was NOT working. Her readers, clearly are not served by a broken link on the FRONT of the blog – a featured post that was framed outside of the other blog content. Simply stated, ANY of her readers who wanted to learn more, were being sent to a broken URL.

The email I got in response….was from “support?” – NOT from Jill, and was a LECTURE on proper html in the resource box, that there was an UPCOMING tutorial they were planning on this – and their policy is NOT to include the resource boxes for authors like ME, who did not comply with their policy.

I have the email response – right here.

I simply replied – that no one was well served by broken links, that I check ALL of my outgoing links when I repurpose, reference or cite someone’s elses content, and I simply requested they take my article down. There was NO accusation ( I have my copy here as well for anyone who would like to see it) and simply, the HUBRIS and Condescension in the assistants email was quite frankly, insulting. MY content, featured on HER site, my name was spelled wrong ( which I didn’t even mention) and MY link is broken.

As a popular publisher, who is AGGREGATING content, Jill has a responsibility to do things the right way – and when a simple, gracious and complimentary email from an author, whose content is being repubslished on HER site ( with her bio next to the post, her pic, and if you like this post, subscribe to “her” RSS feed) – I think the minimum requirement should be a certain level of pleasantness to those work she is benefiting from.

I’m a bit astounded at her take on the situation – as Jill never wrote back, it was all done through “support”…which, to be perfectly honest, was also a bit much.

For the record, my articles are republished by LOTS of people, and lots of them as simple content aggregating spammers. They’ve never had a problem with my resource box, nor the proper spelling of my name, and quite frankly – neither should have Jill.

Lastly – as per any accusations, Jill’s assistant, after asking for the post to come down, told me it would be fixed in the morning (it was) and not to get her in trouble. To which I replied – and I paraphrase, but – ” no worries, sorry, I’ve had a long day – not a big deal either way”.

People never cease to amaze – or dissapoint. I’ve learned something from this exchange. Jill, I hope you have as well.

Best..:-)

Ian Hollander

I already did what you suggest and I’m waiting for my web hosting service’s salvation since Saturday.
My new links are perfect and I explained the complication about the redirection of the old download link to my blog readers.

I hope the salvation won’t delay however, especially for new visitors that probably won’t notice my explanation…

Please contact our Member Support team about specific issues with your account.

I can tell you that we’re still allowing 3 self-serving links and 3 non-self-serving links and that we prefer to see all self-serving links in the RESOURCE BOX and not the article body; but we still do allow 1 self-serving link in the article body provided that you include it near the very bottom of your article body.

On the topic of page not found:

You [AND EVER SINGLE PERSON WHO RUNS A WEBSITE] should configure your website to redirect lost traffic (known as a 404) so that you scoop up lost traffic and be HELPFUL to your visitors so they can find what they were looking for.

Email or call your web hosting service provider to ask them how to set this up.

I’m late and on a hurry again, but I want to ask you how many urls we are allowed to have in our resource box. I don’t have any anchored text now, because I give a free ebook and I have two sites, so I already have three links to my sites in my resource box. However, only the url of one of my sites appears live, the other one is not clickable in my resource box at EzineArticles. Is this a technical mistake or did you do what you intended to, and now we can have only two live links sending people to our sites?

I’m really sorry because now I’m a tourist in the discussions of this blog. Now I don’t have time even to open your page…

However, I’m going to participate of the discussions in the future, as soon as I finish improving my 2 sites and we redirect the old download link of my free ebook in all my old blog posts (around 300 posts – what a problem!) because I changed the appearance of my old site booksirecommend.com and now my old links are sending people to “page not found”… We have to solve this problem and a few other details also for my first free audio ebook, because we have a problem with the sound for the same reason (!), and I’m preparing at the second site many new possibilities about dream translation at the same time, and too many people ask me to help them interpret their dreams… anyhow, and this is why I’m too busy, but I promise to participate of the discussions as I did before, as soon as everything will be working regularly.

1. You don’t have to exclude the www. but that’s up to you. Most of my SE friends say that you should choose just one URL version of your site to ALWAYS promote and you should 301 permanent redirect the other version of your site. (ie: promote the non www. version and 301 rewrite the www. version to point to the non www. version of your site.) We don’t do that here at EzineArticles, but we have chosen to only promote the non www. version of EzineArticles in all venues. If all of this went over your head (not my intention), then please consult with a responsible whitehat SEO person to fill in the pieces.

2) I recommend that you read my article: Essential HTML Skills For Article Authors – 7 Tips

URL No Dots