My Brush with EzineArticles Death
October 18, 2007
If you do any kind of article marketing then you are probably familiar with EzineArticles. 
EA is a human-edited article directory known for having quality content and great search engine saturation. I believe that every article page has a PageRank of 6, which is a nice bonus for the links you paste within your article. But unlike other article sites that simply offer backlink opportunities, EA can actually drive a nice amount of traffic to your site since their content tends to rank well in Google. This makes them the #1 choice for article marketers across the net.
If there is any downside to EzineArticles, it is their strict usage guidelines and submission requirements. They are quick to ban accounts or submissions that don’t meet their terms of use. This has never affected me much since I always pay attention to the rules and never try to sneak anything by the editors. That being said, I was floored the other day when I received an email informing me that my account was suspended. It turns out that one of my pen names had violated a policy on “author names”. Here are the author name regulations as written on the EA website…
Your AUTHOR NAME must have a First name and a Last name.
-We do allow “First name - Last initial” or “First initial - Last Name.”
-We do not allow two initials for your AUTHOR NAME.
-Your First and Last name must begin with a Capital Letter.
-We do not allow company names to be your AUTHOR NAME.
-We do not allow email addresses to be your AUTHOR NAME.
-We do not allow adjectives or nouns or descriptors to be part of your AUTHOR NAME.
-You may NOT include your title after your AUTHOR NAME unless you hold a doctorate-level degree (Dr., MD, DDS, PhD, etc.)
-We do not allow religious titles before or after your name.
-We do not allow more than ONE author name to have an account. If your article was CO-AUTHORED, then please put the CO-AUTHOR’s name in the RESOURCE BOX and we will manually add them as a Co-Author to your article BY-LINE.
Sounds simple enough doesn’t it? But for reasons I still don’t understand, my pen name was flagged by an editor. I can’t give you the name for competition reasons, but I can tell you that it wasn’t a traditional first name. Thus, I am guessing they perceived it as either a “company name” or “adjectives or nouns or descriptors”. It was not my intention to break the rules, but intentions don’t matter when you are using someone else’s website.
The suspension had an immediate impact on my traffic and sales. I receive 50 to 100 unique visitors a day from EA and a handful of my articles rank very well for the niches I target. Because the visitors that come from my article links are so well targeted, I was at risk of losing a consistent stream of warm leads.
EA invited me to correct the problem using their standard “contact us” form. I figured I was up the creek since it would likely take days for them to fix the issue…if they even accepted my resolution. In that time my articles would probably lose their positions in the search engines and my websites would lose the link juice I was getting from EA backlinks.
Obviously I had little choice but to submit a replacement pen name and pray that things would work out. Hundreds of hours of article writing were on the line, yet my destiny was held hostage by a simple contact form. Knowing what I know about people getting banned from adsense and the like, I was not very confident.
Low and behold I received an email the next day approving my new name and reinstating my account. The editor thanked me for my swift response, but mentioned nothing about why the suspension occurred. Frankly, I could care less so long as my articles are back online. My high-ranking submissions appear to have maintained their positions in Google, and a couple of new articles pending approval were accepted. It looks like I avoided catastrophe…this time.
While the whole ordeal was a little stressful, I learned a lot from it. Here are some things I will be changing from my old approach…
-Never assume that a good thing lasts forever.
-Never rely on one source to provide the bulk of your sales.
-Make sure you keep organized copies of your previous submissions. (I never used to worry about having backups for EA submissions since they are all stored in my account).
-Familiarize yourself with an alternative service to the ones you already use. In other words, have a backup strategy for each marketing channel you utilize.
-Don’t get too cute with your author names!
EzineArticles is a great website, and I actually appreciate their stringent policies. It keeps the quality of the website and its content valuable for everyone. I was also very impressed with how quickly they addressed my issue, especially since it could have been quite costly for me. I do however wish that they would have been clearer on what I did wrong. Oddly enough, I had submitted 32 articles over the past year with the same pen name that was suspended. Perhaps they only recently started cracking down on author names?
No matter what the reason was behind my suspension, this was a big wake-up call for me. I need to have three or four proven marketing methods for each site. Article marketing has proven successful for me, but it is time to branch out into other marketing channels. At least then I won’t be screwed if one of them doesn’t like my name!
November 6th, 2007 at 9:14 am
I too had my share of problems with them. The editors wonder if I have provided them with my ‘legal’ name.
I have blogged it and they heard me.
November 10th, 2007 at 6:11 pm
The only complaint I have had with Ezine is the “scraping” of some of my articles (unscrupulous thieves who copy the article, post it as their own creation on their own sites without giving me credit for writing it).
I have not experienced that with Search Warp.
And YES! Always keep backups of all your articles on your own computer (and also on a CDRW)!