Paul Godines Short Story

EzineArticles Expert Author Paul Godines submitted his first 10 articles and wrote us a short-story as to why we should upgrade his account from Basic to Platinum:

Here is why I think I deserve Platinum status:

“One day, a father took his son to the internet with the firm purpose of showing his son how many things he could do. They spent the day on the net surfing, they Googled their name and they emailed their friends and even watched a movie online.

At the end of the day the father asked the son “How was the tour of the internet?”

“It was great” the son replied

“Did you see all that you could do on the net?”

“Oh yea” said the son.

“So tell me, what did you learn?”

The son answered “I saw lots of videos, and webpages and Google and even heard some music.” “But what I learned most was that I found a place I could read about anything I want to learn and write about anything I want.”

His fathers said “Why did you pick writing and not the videos and other stuff?

His son replied “Because its natural to me, I couldn’t stop reading and writing If I tried, it’s my passion.”

Hope this helps, let me know if I can help.”

*Reprinted with permission*

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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on June 30, 2008 at 9:17 pm

710 views | Comments (4)

New Article QC Process Lag Question

If you’ve been following the changes we’re working on… you know that we’re very close from changing our 2nd human QC article reviewers from POST to PRE. That means instead of our quality control team reviewing articles after they were made live; they will be reviewed before the article is made live.

This change has created a new problem of what to do with the article being reviewed during the time lag between the 1st editor approval and the 2nd QC editor’s approval?

We’ve narrowed it down to two options and would like your input:

1. Option #1 is to lock the article down after it is reviewed and approved for the few hours to a full day before our QC team (editor #2 that touches your articles) can review the approval of the 1st editor.
• Upside to this is that it’s the easiest for us to implement, gives internal credit to the editor for having touched the article, and would be the fastest path for an article to move from review to approval to approval to live on the site.
• Downside is that the author would NOT be able to edit his or her article once it’s been reviewed by the 1st editor during this time lag span of a few hours to a day.
2. Option #2 is to let the Author edit the article after it’s been approved by the 1st editor, but the action of the Author editing their article would cause the article to be put to the back of the review line.
• Upside to this option is that the Author retains control over being able to fix problems within their article before it goes live on the site.
• Downside to this option is our editors will be doing work that is wasted and anytime an Author edits his or her article, it’ll take longer to approve because it’ll move to the back of the line.

Your thoughts on Option #1 or #2?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on June 30, 2008 at 10:12 am

801 views | Comments (20)

Articles By Expert Name Domains

Interesting little microcosm of a trend happening here by some of our members:

• http://www.ArticlesbyJeff.com – Jeff Herring
• http://www.ArticlesbyAlex.com – Alex Mandossian
• http://www.ArticlesbyKevin.com – Kevin Nations
• http://www.ArticlesbyMike.com – Mike Stewart
• http://www.ArticlesbyAndrew.com – Andrew Poletto
• http://www.ArticlesbyConnie.com – Connie Regan Green
• http://www.ArticlesbyRobert.com – Robert Lee Goodman

Essentially they have made it easier to mention or give out their EzineArticles expert author URL in a domain name format that is easier to say, spell or be remembered when the ‘elevator pitch’ moment happens.

Jeff Herring gets the credit for coming up with this idea.

If you’ve got one to add to the above list, add a blog comment and give your articlesbyyourname a plug. What do you think? Crazy idea or Smart?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on June 26, 2008 at 12:21 pm

887 views | Comments (42)

New Expert Author Profile Views Stat

Now, when you log in to your EzineArticles Membership account, you’ll notice a new “Profile Views” stat that will now track the # of visitors to your Expert Author Profile (example) & Extended Author Profile (example).

Because we didn’t start tracking your EzineArticles Profile Views until this week, it’ll only be accurate from this week forward and doesn’t include all prior months/years prior.

Why we added resources to support this Profile Views metric:

This was the 1st step in a larger project (not announced yet) designed to help give you more information on the impact of your presence on EzineArticles.com as an Expert Author.
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on June 25, 2008 at 5:56 am

769 views | Comments (14)

Affiliate Link Quality Range

As you may already know from Section 3 of our Editorial Guidelines, EzineArticles allows links from affiliate marketers provided that the URL used is OWNED by the AUTHOR of the article and is a primary domain (can’t be a sub-domain or domain with sub-directory).

This barrier of entry is a message that should communicate that if you’re too cheap to buy a $10 domain, that you haven’t done your homework yet. Prior to this rule, we had a serious inflow of PLR & non-exclusive rights content that made it clear that some (not all) affiliate marketers are only out for a fast buck at any cost.

Here is the range of affiliate link redirects that give us pause sometimes when reviewing articles so that you could see ‘under the hood’ to our thinking:

1. DNS Rewrite: Fastest method to move a visitor from a primary domain to an affiliate link.
2. Meta-Refresh: HTML code that moves a visitor. Tip: If you’re going to use this method, make the delay = zero (don’t waste the visitors time)
3. Framed: Deceptive, confusing, untruthful. This is where a zero pixel frame is setup to show the domain name in the URL address bar, but the contents of the browser show a different affiliate linked URL.
4. Script Detect Referrer: Highly evil, creates no trust, makes us question your value as a member. This is where a script detects the title of the referring article and then redirects the traffic based on which affiliate link is A/B split tested to provide the highest yield that day. Makes us uneasy because of how fluid the owner of the script can change the quality of the user experience.

Now, put your mind in the experience of the user reading your article:

Does the user have a positive experience when they click the link that continues the trust-building process you started by offering your expertise in the article body?

If you can’t answer yes, then FAIL.
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on June 24, 2008 at 9:14 am

924 views | Comments (18)

Articles Attract Positive Comments

A hidden and much overlooked benefit of writing & marketing quality original articles:

Your articles on EzineArticles.com and other sites that
syndicate your articles will attract positive comments
that you can aggregate as 3rd party proof of your expertise.

Over the years, keep track of these comments and reach out when possible to the people who left the comments to thank them (and ask for their permission to use their comments in your website/marketing materials).
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on June 22, 2008 at 11:40 pm

2,348 views | Comments (22)

The End of Derivative Content

In the blogosphere they call regurgitated/recycled content made primarily from a derivative of other works as “blogoreaha”. I suppose we could call it “articleareeha” but I prefer to call it “article vomit.”

You know what I’m talking about as it’s very easy to spot this type of content. Usually the author is so embarrassed that they won’t even put their real name on the article or they won’t include their name in the resource box or the landing page that the URL in the resource goes to.

One of the foundations of the success of EzineArticles (besides its’ its highly successful, intelligent and attractive expert authors (nice suck up, eh?)) is our ability to detect in real-time exact duplicate and duplicative article submissions and then use that algorithm to either tag the content as suspect to be further processed or hard reject it before our 2 human editors even see it.

We call it CASM (Content Association Sequence Matching) and this has been 3+ years in development behind-the-scenes.

Over a million articles have been processed by the proprietary EzineArticles CASM system and this allows us to know many distinctions about every article that our members submit and about the pattern of various accounts…including (but not limited to):

• Article content submitted is infringing on itself (meaning the author is rewriting his or her own works by way of rearrangement (not cool))
• Article content duplicates in part or whole on other alternative authors within an account
• Article content duplicates in part or whole against another author’s account (whether their articles are live or not)
• Article content duplicates in part or whole against other articles that have been since deleted or rejected.
• Lots of data about the date history of the duplicated or duplicative content… ie: Article content submitted a bunch of times by various members is a clue we use.

It’s not a perfect system, but we’ve had years of refinement to improve our ability to prevent false positives. There’s quite a bit more to the above list that I can’t share… including how we vary the shield frequency harmonics to prevent enemy ships from beaming non-unique content through our shield.

CASM was originally created to defend against PLR (Private Label Rights) non-exclusive rights content being submitted, but it also proved further useful to defend against plagiarism…something we have a zero tolerance for.

Millions of weekly EzineArticles visitors do not want to see duplicate or duplicative content and we’ve bent over backwards to keep it out of the site.

Read This Tip A Few Times Please: The absolute best way to beat duplicate content filters is to create unique article content in the first place!
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on June 20, 2008 at 3:00 pm

1,282 views | Comments (40)

What To Do With Duplicate Titles?

Out of over a million live articles, 13,915 duplicate article titles (only title is duplicated, content is unique) exist on 34,782 articles (3.5%) and we need your help to figure out what action to take.

History:

• November 4th, 2005 we stopped accepting article titles that were exact-match duplicates of existing article titles.
• This was a defensive position prior to our current proprietary anti-duplicate content filters & routines that was receiving heavy development later that month in 2005.
• Early 2006-Today, we reversed our Nov 2005 position and began allowing exact-match duplicate article titles because we now had/have the capabilities to ensure algorithmically that the article body would not be duplicate or derivative of other works.

Why we’re thinking duplicate article titles are a liability?
(even in a world where we know for certain the article body is not a duplicate or derivative of any other article)?

Answer = We perceive that it’s better to have a site of 100% original article titles than to allow a small percentage of them to be duplicated. This is a perception not based on fact; but on belief that some traffic referral partners may give more weight to an article title than the article body and that ~21,000+ articles may be overlooked as not credible (therefore not indexed) even though they have quality original content in all of them.

How to solve this?
Here’s what we’ve ruled out so far:
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on June 18, 2008 at 9:34 am

851 views | Comments (22)

EzineArticles System Status

Quite a few things changing behind-the-scenes speed-improvements that I wish I didn’t have to mention (we prefer to make improvements so they appear seamless) but feel obligated to let you know what to expect:

1. Article Page Views hit counts may fluctuate for the next 24 hours. Rest assured that we’re not losing any data and that you’ll be able to continue to have confidence after the current server changes we’re making. Perhaps today is not a good day to check your article stat.
2. 59k Articles had improper original dates on them. ~26k have been repaired. Articles prior to 2008 have been fixed. This problem was identified when an article was PA’d (Problem Article) and it took the date accepted as the original date instead of the actual original date. Will be repaired by the end of this week.
3. New CASM (Content Association Sequence Matching) system upgrade is now live… and smarter than ever at identifying exact match duplicate submissions and derivative submissions that will be auto-rejected. This update takes a more fined-tune approach at stopping members who re-write their own works or re-write the works of others.

One of our selfish motivations with the investments we’re making in additional dedicated servers is to significantly improve the speed of our members (expert authors) experience… because we know that if our members have a mega-fast experience when using their private membership interface, they are more likely to submit more articles, update their account profiles, and generally engage the site more frequently.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on June 17, 2008 at 10:11 am

685 views | Comments (6)

EzineArticles Network Admins

Here’s a sneak peak into our Network Admin’s office:

What does a Network Admin do? They maintain physical site & services uptime, security, and generally work on the network layer to support the services that the EzineArticles platform delivers.

Translation = They are on call and get up at 2am in the morning when the servers die.
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on June 13, 2008 at 3:45 pm

887 views | Comments (7)

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