Buzzle Deleted All Of My Articles

I have had an account with Buzzle for about as long as I have had an account with Squidoo, which is 3-4 years. Over the years, Buzzle has gotten more and more difficult to work with. For example, initially you could have several links in an article and about 1 or 2 years ago, this was changed so that you could only have one link. A very restrictive policy, but because Buzzle appeared to be a quality website, I submitted content from time to time.

Recently, I went to submit a new article and discovered that all of my articles were gone! Deleted. No word from their administration, simply all ten of my articles, all written just for Buzzle had vanished. I wrote this to their admin:

I have had an account with Buzzle for years. I probably had 10 articles submitted and reviewed. All were original. Imagine my surprise to log on and find all of them gone. Those articles represented hours of work. What happened to them?

Here is the response:

We periodically review content from both current and inactive accounts. Such procedure updates our database to ensure Buzzle.com offers a high quality experience to our users. During routine reviews one or more of your articles were deleted so that our database remains updated with the latest content.

So, first Buzzle insists upon unique content. Then, they do not tell you, but your articles have a limited lifespan on their website. When they want to "update their website" they will simply delete all of your content and say nothing to you.

The other thing is that all of my content that I had submitted to Buzzle was plagiarized and appeared elsewhere on the internt by copyright thieves who had stolen my content. So now all of my hard work is gone, and only under the names of the copyright thieves who stole it. Thanks alot Buzzle.

Question, why would ANYONE write for Buzzle knowing that Buzzle will eventually delete their content? So, let this be a warning to other authors. Submitting content to Buzzle is a waste of time.

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ArticleZones Article Directory: Batting 50-50

As written earlier, I am trying to find article directories with which to generate links from my website. I will continue to post my findings here.

Article Zones is an article website which publishes immediately. Links are not allowed in the article body. Only two links are allowed in the resource box. That is a bummer. Only 250 words are required, which is a good thing.

I have submitted four articles to Article Zones. The first two which published in April 2010 and April 2011 were both indexed by Google. The second two which were published in May and June 2011 have not yet been indexed even though I submitted them to Pingler.

It is possible that in time these two articles will get indexed, so I will link to them here and come back and see: Why are people buying adult footies and The Most Unique Christmas Gift.

Who knows, maybe giving them a link from this blog will help in the indexing process.

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The Best Article Directory?

You have built a website and are looking for places to give it links. You search the internet for suggestions and what do you see? Virtually every list of article directories place Ezines at the top of the list. Common logic is to write an article and place it in Ezines. Why? Ezines gets alot of traffic and has high Google rankings (PR 6) Sounds like a good idea? I am not so sure.

I have placed several articles in Ezines and this is what I do not like about it:

* The Ezine rules and regulations are amazingly strict. 400 word minimum, under 2% of your words can be keywords, 1 week approval time, links to your website ONLY in the resource box at the end of your article. Break any of their rules and your article is rejected. WOW! You are sending Ezines free content and have to jump through very high hurdles just to get them to publish it. But rules are good right? It means that if your article is "selected" for publication that it will be some value to you, right? Not necessarily.

* I have placed some articles into Ezines that were not indexed by google. If they are not indexed by Google, that means that Google does not even know about it. The articles that are not indexded, and their links, are of no value to me.

* The ezine URL of the articles is not a standard URL ending in a suffix like .html, rather it is long and messy. I am not certain if this plays a role in the indexing process, but it is hard to link to. I have had some sites, for example SheToldMe.com where I often link to help articles get indexed, refuse to accept it. At shetoldme, I get the error message "Story's URL: The URL is not functioning!". No wonder, the URL is a mess.


* Almost every article that I have placed has been reproduced on other website. The copied articles almost NEVER include my links to my website. In fact many of the "stolen" copies of my articles include links to other websites. Why do I say stolen? If they have not included the link to my website, this is against the terms of use of Ezines. Problem is that Ezines does nothing to inforce the terms of use. They leave this battle to you the author to fight.

* The copied articles often rank higher in the search engines than my original article in Ezines. How do I know that? Just do a search on the tile of the article. See how many copies come up and see where the Ezines copy ranks.

* So, if google is seeing, for example, 5 versions of your article and the only version of your article with your links in it are at the bottom. How valuable is that article for your website? It will probably not send you any traffic. If Google is ranking other articles, it is possible that the links of those articles have higher value.

* Yes, I see the arguement, "Ezines has Google PR 6, so if I get an article published there, I am passing lots of value to my website. I am not convinced that Google PR is the be all and end all of value of a link. If the link is not indexed, I believe it has no value. If other copies of the article are published which do not have your links in it, I believe that it decreases the value of your article. You will probably get no traffic and since it will be seen as duplicate content, you may get little value from the links.

What do I prefer instead of Ezines? An article published on Squidoo has MUCH higher value in my opinion than an article on Ezines. Why is Squidoo a better place to publish than Ezines?

* Squidoo has little or no review process.
* Squidoo publishes immediately
* YOU have control about where to place your links as well as the number of links
* Your article will give you traffic, links AND money.
* Squidoo articles have short, clean URLs
* My Squidoo articles generally achieve PR 2-4

So, if you are only going to place one article, I think it is clear that you should place it in Squidoo rather than in Ezines. But what if you are going to place many articles? I still think that Ezines is not best place for a unique article. The time you spend meeting all of their requirements has little value when your article is going to end up all over the internet with links to websites other than your own. I would rather suggest to place your article in other article directories where you can place your links in the body of the article rather than in the resource box at the bottom which the copyright right thief will simply leave out. A recent article I submitted to Amazines Why Do So Many People Wear Adult Footie Pajamas? was approved in 1 day. I was able to include as many links as I like and in this article, I have four links. There is no requirement for the links to be placed at the bottom in the resource box, I am able to place my links in the body of the article. This seems better to me.

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The Problem With Snipsly

I am always on the look out for simple ways of giving my websites and lenses "DoFollow" links. So, I like sites like SheToldMe and Snipsly. There are very minimal requirements and in a few seconds you can easily give work a link. You even can give these sites your adsense code and earn some money. In theory that is.

My first post with Snipsly was in August 2010. In total I have 4 posts with Snipsly. My Google statistics show me that since then I have had 8 ad views and have earned NOTHING on my 4 posts. Worse yet, two of my posts are not even indexed by Google. Ok, one of the non-indexed posts is only about two weeks old so there is still a chance. But one of the posts is about 2.5 months old and I doubt it will ever get indexed. This means that my links there are probably worthless.

The good thing is that Snipsly allows editing. So, I have added text to one of the posts and I hope that someday it will get indexed.

That is one of the advantages of giving a link from a blog like this one. Like Smipsly, there are few writing requirements. But you can almost be assured that your blog post will get indexed and thus your link will matter. In fact, I am coming to think that the BEST links you can give your website are from a blog with some PR.

So, becareful on those quick links. They may require little time, but they may be worthless too.

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Best Reviewer: Easy Backlinks & Plenty of Potential

A lot of Squidoo lensmasters are using a new site, Best Reviewer, for quick backlinks to their lenses. Right now, Poddys is the top referrer, and Jimmie the homeschool mom is the top publisher. I'm the top commenter.

The user interface is simple so you can write quickly and easily... not a whole lot of complex thought is needed to create a page there. All the pages are "Top Ten" type lists though you can range from "Top Three" up to "Top Twenty".

To write the article, you compose the title, a short intro, and then your listed items. Each listed item has room for a link. Like I said, a lot of Squidoo lensmasters are linking back to their lenses. I made three pages with affiliate links to Amazon. Use your imagination and business sense here! An example: "Top Three Best-in-Niche Lenses".

Squidoo lensmastering is more than just making lenses. We also must let people know about them.

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HOT TIP: Blog Network Offers Multiple Backlinks FREE

As online publishers we are always on the lookout for free links to our websites and Squidoo lenses. As we all know, search engines love links. The more the better. I have found a way to get several quality links for free. It is called PubRocket.

PubRocket is a network of blogs. There are over 200 blogs in the network divided amongst various topics including Beauty, Business, Dating, Domestic, Fashion, Financial, Fitness, Health, Home Improvement, News, Pets, Pregnancy, Shopping, Technology.

You only have to write a 200 word article and you can get it published FREE on any three of those blogs. In each article you may include 3 backlinks for free.

It is simple to use, you just add your article to your dashboard, select the 3 blogs from a list of 200 and click on publish. You are then asked to submit different titles for each of the 3 articles. Although I am not sure if changing only the title is enough for the search engines to not consider them duplicate content, it seems like a good idea.

The 200 blogs have google PR which range between PR0 to PR3. So you will quickly have backlinks from 3 different quality blogs. Sound great? It is great, with one little catch. I published my first article yesterday and today had the thought to check the IP address of the 3 blogs I selected. Unfortunately, all three of the blogs I selected had the same IP address.

Some believe that links from the same IP address may be seen by search engines as coming from the same website. That is, that the search engines understand that there is a relationship between websites hosted at the same IP address and may treat all three blogs as though they are the same blog. So, it is possible that you are not actually getting links from 3 different blogs, but as though all three links come from the same blog. Who knows for sure? Only Google.

I love the idea of PubRocket and will be testing it in the future. If anyone has suggestions for other blog networks like PubRocket, please let me know.

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Is There Anything Better Than Squidoo?

Calling all Squids, I would like to get your input on this question: Is there anything better than Squidoo? Or even: Is there anything nearly as good as Squidoo? If there is, I have not found it.

As I reported earlier on this blog, I have a website about footed pajamas. I am trying to get my footed pajamas website to rank high on Google for important keywords like Adult footed pajamas, children's footed pajamas, etc. I am making progress, but I am not there yet.

So, I am trying to find a site which offers all of the wonderful things that Squidoo is able to offer and I can not find it. Squidoo is great. Squidoo offers me the ability to add Dofollow links from my lens to my website, send traffic to my website AND earn some money at the same time. I am not earning a fortune from Squidoo, but there is some money coming in and it is interesting. Further with Squidoo, I am not rigidly moderated, I can publish when I want and there is a very helpful and friendly community to boot. Squidoo is great.

I am pleased with Squidoo and if I can find something similar at another site, it would be even better. However, experiments with sites like Hubpages and Infobarrel have been disappointing. In my experience, neither site generates any income to speak of nor traffic and Hubpages' links become Nofollow if your Hubrank drops below a certain level. I have written 4 high quality articles for Infobarrel and I get zero traffic to my websites and have not earned a dime. I can not figure out how to be successful at either of those sites nor do I really want to invest a great deal more time trying. Frankly, I have all but given up on both of them.

Ezine and GoArticles are good about generating links and traffic, but not money. Other article sites such as Searchwarp and article base actually give you NOfollow links (Uh, why would I submit an article there?).

Today, I spent sometime investigating Qondio, a website which "allows you" to post a blog and earn 100% of your income. Right. The downside, they forget to tell you that there is a hidden $5 activation fee. I say "hidden", because you read their FAQ, no mention of it there. Read their registration page, again no mention. Only after you submit your registration details WHOOPS!! Please pay $5. Now, that is not alot of money. I just hate it when a website does not reveal the games that they are playing upfront. So, I looked on the internet to what other people are saying. Apparently you can give a link to your website at the bottom of your blog, but it is not an anchor text link, it is just a raw link. Also, I read that there is some kind of automated softwear approval mechanism of your post and some writers complain about having their posts rejected for no stated reason. All of that was a turn off for me. I just do not want to spend time writing for a website that proudly states all of the advantages and hides some of the less attractive things. It makes me wonder what else they have up their sleeves.

I looked into Helium articles and while you can earn money, you can not give a link to your site! However, Helium does now have something called Zones that are something like a Squidoo lens and I recently created a new zone. I will be watching to see how that develops.

I am reading strange things from disgruntled EHow authors. Many people are unhappy there and anyway their links are Nofollow....again a no go.

So, fellow Squids, can anyone tell me a site that even comes close to Squidoo in terms of those three criteria? Where can I find a site which will offer:

* Dofollow links to my website
* Traffic to my website
* Interesting earning potential

Or is Squidoo simply a "one of a kind"?

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Horoscope and Zodiac Jewelry - a lens turning into a blog

One of the advantages of having a hostgator webhosting account is that you can set up as many blogs as you want without having to switch to a more expensive plan. That is: you do of course have to buy the domain name, but the various sites (blogs in my case) are all hosted under one account.

One of the least intuitive things you can do with that system is set up a blog ONLY to promote a lens. I know, weird isn't it? But that's what I just did. I spent two days setting up a blog, creating content, building links on something that I expect will only make me money through the promotion of a squidoo lens or two.
Here's the lens: Astrology Horoscope Jewelry 

It does OK selling zodiac jewelry and it gets decent traffic, but I want it to move up a notch in both search engine traffic and sales. And since I'd already bought the domain, I've set up a blog. It's called, not unsurprisingly:  Horoscope Astrology Jewelry. 

Normally I'd have turned the lens around at this point: linking it to the blog wherever reasonably and perhaps toning down on the content on there. Instead I've done the opposite: linked to the lens and used this as part of my link wheel around that lens.

Why? It has to do with being an international publisher. Amazon makes it real hard to get to their money, because they only pay out by check internationally. And guess what: it's expensive as hell the change them into actual money. So one of the reasons I'm active on squidoo is that for me it pays to have a middle man that pays out through paypal.

Of course, if ever Amazon starts paying out directly to my Dutch bank account, or in some other way where I can get to the money without having to jump through hoops, I can always turn the blog around too: link to the blog from the lens and turn the blog into an online 'hub' or the center of my 'link wheel'.

In the mean time though, that blog is going to get older - and therefore more trusted by Google as well. So it makes sense to host and own it myself, not put it on some free account. All thanks to hostgator.

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Getting your lens found in google

Two of my most popular squidoo help lenses are devoted to how to get your lens found in google. The first I made was about that subject specifically, but in order to be really successful one has to start with something else: keyword research.

If you want to make a lens that is successful economically and gets found by google, you need to think about keywords BEFORE you make your lens. This is called 'keyword research'.

I did a blogpost about keyword research on my squidtop blog: analyzing a weight loss lens.

If you've set that up right the next step is promotion. You want your lens found in google, so some people submit their lens to google, yahoo etc. This is a waste of time.

The basis for Search Engine Optimization is getting links (good links) to your lenses. There are all kinds of ways to do that. Within squidoo it makes sense to submit to groups in your niche. But that is also potentially a trap. So I thought I'd give some advice about what to look out for when submitting your lens to a squidoo group. I also did a post analyzing link building for that same weight loss lens I talked about earlier.

One more thing: when it comes to search engine optimization I still see a lot of advice relating to tags. Tag pages however DO NOT COUNT towards your lenses backlink profile. What tags ARE good for was explored here.

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A Secret Search Term to Get More Squidoo Traffic

Shhh! Don’t tell, but I’m going to share a secret with you, one that could result in more traffic to your lenses.

Do you have a lens that features a person, a celebrity, someone that people want to know more about? If so, make sure you include two things on that lens: one, the person’s birthday (date of birth) and, two, the person’s age (so they don’t have to do the math). Fans want to know those things and when they search “how old is so-and-so” or “when is so-and-so’s birthday,” make sure your lens about so-and-so provides the answers for them.

A countdown module (like this one) is a great way to show a person’s birthdate; just remember to update it every year!

That’s the secret. Shhh!

(picture courtesy Gustty via Creative Commons)

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Getting to Giant 100 is a Wonderful Milestone

I am so excited to have reached the milestone of Giant Squid 100 Club. The picture you see here is the T-shirt I got when I reached Giant Squid.

Becoming a Giant Squid is a process and a journey. It is a terrific accomplishment and a lot of hard work. I do want to encourage everyone to go for it. It is definitely worth your time and effort.

What have I learned along the way?

Well, frankly quite a lot, and I am still learning. I came aboard Squidoo as a total novice. I did not know much about SEO, nor did I know much about promoting on the internet. I knew nothing about keywords, and absolutely nothing about Squidoo. So don't think that you need to know a lot to get started. I would recommend just getting started.

For a new person, here are some suggestions:

• Use the information on Squidoo to help you. There are great how-to lenses and terrific mentors everywhere.
• Don't be afraid to try something new!
• Do you see a lens or technique you like? Try it on your own lens.
• Take baby steps. Each lens will make you a better lensmaster.
• Remember you can always go back and edit.
• Don't get too hung up on LensRank. It changes daily.
• Choose topics you love and let us know why.
• Don't take critiques personally. Learn from them.
• Have fun with it.
• Keep your lens focuses on a very specific topic and you will find that you have the best kind of lens.

When I started, 100 lenses seemed very, very far away. But when you keep putting in the time writing one every few days or one every week or two weeks, they add up pretty fast. Before you know it, you will be a Giant Squid too.

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How To Use Free Sitebuilders to Give Yourself Quality Inbound Links

My newest Squidoo lens "How To Use Free Sitebuilders to Give Yourself Quality Inbound Links" is already getting alot of attention. I am pleased to see that although I just posted it 2 days ago, it has several comments, reviews and ratings. Pretty good for a brand new lens.

We are all searching for ways to get quality oneway links in order to improve our Google PR and Site Traffic. It is challenging. But with this simple and free idea, you can give yourself oneway links from these free site builders.

Since people seem to like it, I have been improving it. I have created a drawing to help readers more quickly understand the project (That is the photo you see in ths blog, to see a larger size drawing and to learn more details of the idea visit the lens How To Use Free Sitebuilders to Give Yourself Quality Inbound Links. I have also posted modules so reviewers can make suggestions for improvement. Who knows, maybe one day I will use the suggestions to repeat this project and see if I get better results.

Do you know of some good ways to give your Squidoo Lenses or your blog quality inbound links for free? If so, please leave some comments on this blog. If I learn something interesting, I will blog about it.

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