Have you ever thought about becoming a premium member of Ezinearticles.com? It looks promising at first, but once you are - you will begin to notice that they are incredibly inconsistent in how they enact policies. This can give an enormous advantage to your competition and kill your business. I will provide examples of such inconsistencies, how they can affect your business and as a result, how they should ultimately affect your business decision before investing any money into their website.
Let's start with the obvious. Why do you write articles? Is it because you enjoy sharing information with everyone around you? Possible, but unlikely as you would just have a blog instead. Is it because you have little else to do with your time? Once again, that is possible yet highly unlikely. Is it because you operate some form of business and desire the "SEO" or "Search Engine Optimization" that comes with getting back links? This seems like a much more likely response.
Why are you interested in "SEO?" Once again, I may go out on a limb here and say that it is because you have something to gain from doing so. Whatever website you are promoting likely has the potential to earn you money, or some other reward thus you want it to place as high as possible in the search engine rankings and placement.
So, is EzineArticles.com a good place to invest your money when choosing distribution points for your articles? This is a much more involved question and deserves a honest, logical, and more than anything else objective response. One could say that you should contact Ezinearticles.com to see what kind of value they place on their $600 premium membership program. However, as I will demonstrate to you it becomes clear that they do not act ethically in their own practices, often times giving the advantage to your competition for no apparent reason.
Let's examine their policies. Specifically let's examine their linking policies - you are permitted two links in the body of the article below the fold, and two links in the resource box. The two links in the body should not be for promotion, and the two links in the resource box can be.
That's fine, except what happens when an article of yours is distributed through their network and your resource box isn't included? After all, they strictly prohibit such behavior but when it occurs will do nothing to help you. An example of such activity can be found HERE where Ezinearticles.com has clearly let private content be reproduced without the inclusion of the resource box. That article now produces 0 benefit for it's author as a ranking website has stolen the content through the Ezinearticles.com network, and because the author wasn't permitted to include any self serving links in the body of the article Ezinearticles has created the condition under which such content could be stolen without any reward.
In addition to that, because it is a well ranking blog that stole the content, any of the blog owners that may publish the same content on their site could potentially be outranked. This in turn means that the original author was not only harmed by Ezinearticles.com enabling of someone to steal the content without including the resource box, but actively encouraged the behavior by ensuring that no self-serving links could be placed in the body. On top of that, the content in this situation was stolen through the Ezinearticles.com network and placed on a blog that will likely outrank any other blogs that would include the resource box, causing further potential lose to the original owner.
In this short example we have demonstrated how Ezinearticles enabled content theft to occur, and because of their "Policies" caused even greater potential harm to the original content author. Should Ezinearticles.com be liable for these damages, liable for all attorney fees and statutory damages awarded? One could make a solid argument that it is their rule of preventing you from having a self-promotional link in the body of the document creates an atmosphere for theft without risk or cost to the offending website or blog.
So is this the company that you want to invest any of your advertising budget in? Good question.
Do you like unlevel playing fields where some authors can drop.info redirects right inside of the article body and some can't?
Do you enjoy having your content stolen with no reward to yourself, and further more having Ezinearticles help enable this by preventing you from having self-promotional links within the content of the body?
Do you like to correct all of the errors within an article that was turned down to only have it turned down for an entirely new reason not originally listed during the first submission?
If so, then the unlevel and theft encouraging platform of Ezinearticles.com is the perfect fit for your company!
Ezinearticles.com is a Private, Trademarked, and protected name. All rights, claims and logo's are the sole property of the trademark owner. Theft of the name Ezinearticles.com without the proper acknowledgement of the owner/owners is strictly prohibited under law. Theft of the articles from Ezinearticles.com is perfectly acceptable. The fact that they don't follow the same rules for every article and let some author's have affiliate redirects in the body of the articles, while telling others that it is too promotional is self evident as biased and raises the question of civil liability for the respective property owners.
Refund my membership fee, or allow me to compete with everyone else in my niche who puts affiliate redirect links in their article bodies. I'm not doing anything that anyone else hasn't already and I haven't complained about the atmosphere for theft and abuse that your rules promote and give an open avenue to - but I will, now.
