Selling Websites for a Living

Earlier today I read about a guy claiming to use ezine articles to build thousands of back links to his $3 a day Adsense sites. The gist of it was he submits articles into the top popular categories regardless of where the bio link points.

Example….submit an article about weight loss and put a link in the bio to his blog about “mens pink deck shoes”

The theory went that its the popular categories that the scrapers go to for their content so his article about weight loss will be picked up where as an article about mens deck shoes wouldn’t.

I have plenty of articles already in some of the top categories so to test the theory I just spent an hour copy and pasting sentences from my most recent submissions into google to see how many have actually been distributed either by auto scrapers or real webmasters looking for some decent content.

Google found duplicates for the first 5 I tried BUT none had my link back. Some had just removed the bio while others made sure the links were dead. One article I had written had a link within the actual article body but that had been changed into an affiliate link by the site owner.

Not good.

The other thing that struck me was google only returned the EZA version before the “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed” message.

So, my articles are being distributed but only to spammers using software that scrapes the content from EZA and then rips out any code that provides a link back for the author and even if the links were left in its still a pointless excercise because Google sees it as duplicate content anyway.

The only linking benefit then to submitting to EZA is the one link you get back from them. Is that worth the hoops Ezine Articles make you jump through to get your article published?