It doesn’t seem quite right.

There’s been speculation that size matters, hence the supposed reason that an original or upsized version ranks first, and it just happens to be linked to someone else’s article–often belonging to Demand Media–instead of your own, with its thumbnail image version.

There’s been speculation that Google controls the outcome of the search, and that’s not accurate. Google follows the lead of the publisher. That’s a big part of what makes Google search relevant; if a publisher says,

“Hey, lookie here, search engine. See that H1 tag? That’s important stuff, and those bold words are something I want my readers to notice, so pay attention.”

Google notices and responds accordingly. And Google gives your pages and images the same importance that you give them. Do you link to one page from several places on your site? Google will notice, and that page will rank higher than others in your site that have fewer internal (and/or external) links.

It works the same way for images.

So I was curious. What would happen if I searched for one of my own original images that I had uploaded to an InfoBarrel article a couple of months ago?

The results were so natural, and so—what you would normally expect them to be—that I will let them speak for themselves. Below is a screenshot of my Google image search for: make a scrapbook in Photoshop. You can repeat these results for yourself.

All of the images with red arrows pointing to them are mine. Notice that the LARGER image version, which links to a set of articles that are related by keyword, (mine and other authors) is SECOND, which shoots that theory down.

This screenshot shows that my image ranks first in Google for the original InfoBarrel article in which I posted it.

And Bohica the elephant will be back soon (I hope) to help prove my theories as well, just as soon as Google finds him. It seems the Google image bot doesn’t visit the Pink Elephant jungle nearly as often as it does Text City.

Crunchy Data: The primary reason that my friends and readers ask about InfoBarrel is that it’s one of the more similar models to eHow and as you know, eHow has broken trust with its members in a big way. Writers are wary of investing months of their time in yet another online bait-and-switch scheme.

With that in mind, the most common questions that I see people ask about InfoBarrel are these, Ryan:

Will you reduce the revenue share for writers when your site becomes more profitable?

Ryan: We have no plans on changing our revenue share model. We feel the current model works and has allowed us the ability to grow at a comfortable rate. Our goal is to be one of the top places for writers to create content online; in order to accomplish this I think it is imperative we have a very competitive, transparent revenue share model.

Crunchy Data: Will you ever use writers’ profiles and articles without permission and/or without compensating with at least the same revenue share that all writers earn, for anything other than advertising InfoBarrel? (like eHow did with the non-earning site mirror.)

Ryan: I was actually pretty baffled from both an SEO and moral standpoint when eHow created a mirrored site. First of all, it creates tons of duplicate content across their two sites, and second of all it is essentially hurting the people who helped create your brand in the first place.

If you take away the thousands of writers who built your site, you more or less have nothing. With that said, we love our contributors and will not be publishing their content in any malicious manner.

Crunchy Data: Can IB members add Statcounter’s HTML code to their articles as an additional way to track views?

Ryan: No, a lot of code is stripped when users publish on Infobarrel. We offer users the ability to use Google Analytics once they’ve published ten articles*. As far as I am aware Google Analytics is an industry leader that provides very accurate statistics.

Crunchy Data: Do you have any documented earnings to show that IB writers can earn, on average, between $2 and $5 or more per article, per month? Can you give us any examples of high-earning members or articles?

Ryan: A number of users are vocal about their earnings, others are more private to prevent people trying to hijack their keywords. One member who is pretty vocal about his earnings is JCMayer777. He was earning over $700 per month when we did this interview. Howie also makes a few hundred a month, and I know of someone else who makes roughly $50 a month.

The earnings per thousand are really dependent on what topics you write about. Somebody who writes recipes is going to earn substantially less per thousand visitors than somebody who is writing about lawyers and lawsuits. On the flip side, the recipes articles will probably be easier to rank for due to the fact that there is less money in the niche.

From my experience, and the accounts I’ve looked at, I’m seeing people’s eCPM range from $5-$20 depending on the topics they write about and how much keyword research they apply. Promoting your articles can also impact your earnings, probably more than most people realize.

Crunchy Data: What can you tell people to reassure them that InfoBarrel is going to be around for several years to come?

Ryan: While I’ve been working in the online space for over a decade, I can tell you that I’ve never had a project that I held so closely to my heart as InfoBarrel. I struggle to fall asleep every night because I have ideas bouncing around in my head for the site.

Our team has big goals for InfoBarrel, and we take baby steps every day pushing it towards becoming a large player in the space. I spend more time thinking about this web site than is probably healthy, and have some pretty big long term goals for it.

Our passion for this site flows into our customer service, and I think quality customer service is the basis for all successful businesses. I’m a very ambitious person, and will not settle for anything less than success with InfoBarrel.

Crunchy Data: What is your best advice for people who want to earn a long-term, residual income on InfoBarrel?

Ryan: Set goals, and do something every day, even if it is small, it will help you get closer to reaching them. Generating income online isn’t as simple as posting an article and forgetting about it. If you can learn to be proficient with the following things, your earnings potential are limitless.

1. Learn how to do keyword research properly
2. Learn to format your content for the web (for viral purposes)
3. Interlink your content
4. Create at LEAST 1 back link for every article you publish

If you go after low hanging fruit (low competition, high value long tail keywords) and build at least one to two quality backlinks per article it should be a breeze to make at least $1 per article per month. I’ve tested this strategy time and time again and as a result have created at least a couple Infobarrel test articles that generate over $50/month. It is just a matter of honing your craft.

Crunchy Data: Would you ever use inside information (i.e. Google Analytics) about which articles do well, to write your own competing articles, or to help other members write articles that compete against general members’ articles?

Ryan: Morally, I think this is pretty low.  Trying to compete with your members more or less defeats the purpose of crowdsourcing.  Without success people become discouraged, and if somebody has hit the jackpot on a series of articles, creating competing articles is going to reduce their success and potentially stop them from creating future content.  If people stop creating content, then the site is a failure.  This business is built on people, and we would never do anything to hurt our members.

Crunchy Data: One eHow member/insider recently claimed to have obtained another member’s IP address, which would be impossible without that person having been granted some level of admin access. Who sees users’ private information on InfoBarrel, and how do you protect personally identifying information?

Ryan: The only people who have access to information like that is myself and Kevin.  We don’t even have a control panel available where people can access that information.  If we need to compare IPs, we do manual database calls.  Outside of the two of us there is NOBODY with access to the InfoBarrel databases.

Crunchy Data: Any plans for member-moderators on your forum, and if you ever go in that direction, would you be transparent about their roles?

Ryan: We will most likely eventually have member moderators.  With the amount of people currently contributing on the forums, we don’t think we need additional moderators.  When things get a bit busier, we will definitely be considering member moderators and like just about every other aspect of the site, we will definitely employ full transparency.

If you have any other questions, feel free to let me know!

Crunchy Data: Thank you, Ryan!

InfoBarrel is one of the sites that I have examined closely, and based on its traffic trends, transparent communications, generous revenue-sharing with writers, and quality control policies, I believe that InfoBarrel is one of but a small handful of sites that writers can invest in with confidence.

Writers, you are not likely to make thousands on InfoBarrel overnight, or even in three months. But based on what I have seen, and on Ryan McKenzie’s answers to our questions, I believe it is possible to slowly and steadily build a passive residual income stream on InfoBarrel that will reap consistent dividends for the next three to five years or more.

InfoBarrel has not inflated initial earnings to lure writers in, as at least one site seems to have done in the past. The InfoBarrel site and its management are as candid and transparent as they appear to be. This is how InfoBarrel works, and it’s good news for writers in the long run, which is what writing online for residual income is all about.

*Note: IB members no longer need to be pre-approved to have access to Google Analytics. Once you have published ten articles, you will be able to use this feature to learn more about traffic to your articles. Ten bonus stars for InfoBarrel!

Some friends and I recently asked Brian to analyze SEO on a few eHow articles to find out if any particular categories seemed to be decreasing in earnings more than others. Brian likes math. I don’t. And he does a great job on his blog of analyzing article SEO factors.

Brian’s preliminary findings on the data that was sent to him leads him to conclude that on-page SEO for many older articles is a moot point. Brian has other ideas for how you can move those articles up in the search engines. He says,

The thing is however that you can only do so much on-page SEO. You can’t keep improving it; there is a point of maximum return and no amount of time or effort will make the on-page SEO any better. That’s why you should not dwell on it. Just do what you need to do and move on to more important things.”

And then he spells out the “more important things” in detail. So if you want to move some stubborn articles into the residual earnings zone, go read his Ultimate Guide to Making The Most Money With Online Writing and start kicking some residual income butt today!

When you delete your articles from eHow, they can step this unfair competition up a notch by redirecting your old link to either a list of their prepaid articles or to a (very) similar, prepaid article that they no longer have to pay residual earnings on.

eHow keeps the age of your URL and any backlinks you created that are out of your control to redirect or delete. The net effect is that your article, which hopefully you have moved to a legitimate residual income site, is going to have trouble unless you let Google know that the original is gone.

Another blogger has kindly written a helpful procedure up for you to follow to remove dead eHow article links that should solve this problem. Please let one of us know if it doesn’t work for you for any reason, as we all need to help each other deal with the eHow scam and keep on top of these things.

I use Traffic Travis (a free download) to find out which social bookmarking sites, and which user-generated content sites rank highest for any given keywords, and then focus on promoting my articles using those sites.

For example, articles submitted to Stumble Upon often get more traffic than articles that were not “Stumbled,” and if I search for a long-tail keyword phrase in Traffic Travis, Stumbled articles frequently appear in the top 10 or 20 results (though not in this particular example). This example does tell me that adding articles with my long-tail keyword to some of these sites, and adding links to my blog (or to my higher paying articles, like HubPages), may boost my traffic.

This also shows why watching Yahoo! Answers for questions in your niche and then answering them with a link to your site can pay off. But you should answer a few questions without adding links for every one answer that you do add a link to to avoid appearing spammy and having your account banned.

But what is true today may not hold true tomorrow in SEO land. So watch the trends.

Lately, I have been seeing more Mixx results in my Traffic Travis searches, which tells me I may want to start “Mixxing” my articles.

IMPORTANT: Use social bookmarking in a “social” manner. If you give the appearance of being a spammer by submitting only your own sites, most of these sites will suspend or delete your account. Try to bookmark at least five of other people’s sites and articles for every one of your own that you submit.

Obviously, broad keywords are more competitive, and larger, more established websites will usually rank in the top 20 for those. For example, pet food companies such as, “Purina” will usually own most of the top spots for the broad term, “cat food.” But if you search for “which cat food is healthiest for my cat,” at least 7 of the top 20 search results are for user-generated content sites. (Above is an example of using Traffic Travis to determine this.)

So if I write about “healthy cat food,” and I find that my long-tail keywords consistently show up in these sites, in this order, I’ll know that I should publish on some of these sites to rank higher. I’ll find questions at Yahoo answers to respond to, make a HubPage, etc. If I have a cat food site, I’ll point most of my articles to my own site, where possible.

You can see these same results in Google without using Traffic Travis, just not as clearly. And BE CAREFUL to not use Traffic Travis more than 3-5 times in one day, or Google starts banning your IP address from being able to use cache view. Google doesn’t like Traffic Travis, because automated search programs like Traffic Travis tie up their servers.

Bottom line: monitor your search results over time to see which social bookmarking and user-generated content sites are ranking highest for long-tail keywords, then use those sites to promote your content.

P.S. Read this very interesting article on the “Stumble Effect” by Crystal Williams…I think she’s on to somethng here…

The following guest post is an overview of HubPages by Carla, with a link to more information. Thanks, Carla!

How to Build Residual Income with HubPages

By Carla Chadwick

If you’re a writer who wants to build residual income, you’ll eventually run across HubPages. I consider myself lucky that I did so early in my Internet marketing career, because my hub revenues now provide a large chunk of my income. It wasn’t easy at first, because there wasn’t anyone to give me an overview of how HubPages works. That’s why I wrote How to Make Money Writing on HubPages, which gives step-by-step instructions on how to build hubs and monetize them.

Even though the hub linked above is about as long as War and Peace, there are still subtleties it doesn’t cover. So I’d like to address some of them here. My goal is to give writers who are considering investing their time in HubPages a better sense of what awaits them.

Do-follow vs. no-follow links

Many people want to know whether HubPages links are do-follow or no-follow. The answer is that they can be either; it just depends on your status within the HubPages community. If you keep your HubScore (the score attached to your profile, not to individual hubs) above 74, your links will be do-followed. Your links will automatically be no-followed if your score falls below that.

You can keep your score above 74 by making sure that at least some of your hubs have more than 1,000 words. If some of them are even longer, so much the better. It’s also a good idea to include some of the extra capsules provided within each hub, which allow for the inclusion of polls, quizzes, news and RSS feeds, photos or illustrations and videos. The more capsules you add, the higher your HubScore will be. One caveat, though: there should be no more than 100 outgoing links on a hub, including RSS and news feeds.

Speaking of links, it’s important to note that you’re allowed only two links to each domain in a hub. That restriction is waved, however, if you include an RSS feed to your blog. Feed capsules allow for up to eight links, as long as you don’t have any other links to that domain within the same hub. Also, be aware that if you have two sites connected by redirects, those will count as one domain.

Residual income potential

HubPages offers four official revenue streams: AdSense, Kontera, Amazon and eBay. AdSense is run by default if you have any “commercial” links (links that provide any SEO and/or marketing value to the hub owner) within your hub, so you’ll want to enter your AdSense affiliate code immediately. Otherwise you may miss out on some revenue. The other programs are optional, but I’ve found they all produce revenue.

HubPages doesn’t split revenue with their authors; they split impressions, at the rate of forty percent of the impressions going to HubPages and 60 percent going to you. That means that if a visitor lands on your hub when your affiliate code is being displayed on the page (which happens 60 times out of 100), you will get 100 percent of the revenue, whether it’s AdSense, Kontera, Amazon or eBay. HubPages gets 100 percent of the revenue from the other 40 out of 100 clicks.

You can use your own affiliate links too. If you do, the revenue from those would be 100 percent yours. There’s also an opportunity to build even more residual income by signing up other authors under you. The payment formula is a little complicated, so I won’t cover it here. You can read about that in the hub I’ve linked above.

As with most Internet marketing endeavors, HubPages revenue is entirely dependent on the keywords you choose, and how much you promote and optimize those pages. One of the things I love about HubPages is that someone who won’t click on an ad elsewhere will click on an ad on HubPages. I don’t know why, but I’ve seen that behavior consistently, and so have other Hubbers. So if you get the traffic there and the hub is well-optimized, you will make money.

Because of this, I and many other Hubbers have niche blogs that exist primarily to send traffic to hubs. Blogger blogs work nicely for this, because there’s no money needed and they’re easy to maintain. If you should pursue that approach, though, make sure your blog is relatively plain. Fancy backgrounds and a lot of colors will only distract your visitors from clicking over to your hubs. I use graphic ads to get people to click through, but you can use text links if you want. You can see an example of how I direct traffic through ads on my WordPlay blog.

Naturally, if you already have niche blogs that are getting traffic, those would also be great places to post links to your hubs. Using web properties that already have traffic to direct visitors to your hubs would greatly speed the time it takes to begin generating revenue.

Because of the diversity of reporting methods for revenue sources, it’s not really possible to tell you how much I make on individual hubs. But I can tell you that I made approximately $2,000 in December 2009, using the four standard HubPages revenue sources, plus a separate affiliate program that I promote on some of my hubs. That revenue came from a mix of 153 hubs of varying ages and was higher than I usually experience because I have quite a few holiday hubs. I anticipate the revenue for December 2010 will be even higher, because I will have built more hubs by then, and my existing hubs and their incoming links will have aged.

The revenue the rest of the year goes up and down for me, depending on which of my seasonal hubs is getting traffic at any given time. I built many of my seasonal hubs first, because they have a tendency to pay more and generate huge bursts of traffic. But that’s not enough to create a consistent income, so I’m now in the process of building more hubs on topics with year-round appeal.

I promote my hubs through article marketing, link exchanges and other link-building. Hubs get an initial lift in Google because HubPages.com is a strong domain. But that lasts only for a short while and won’t happen at all for some more competitive keywords. So if you don’t plan to do link-building for your hubs or at least for blogs that point to them, save yourself some time and don’t build any hubs at all. If you’re willing to build links but don’t know how, though, the hub linked at the top of this page will explain it and give you linking resources.

Community

I’ve found many supportive and wonderful people who write for HubPages. These people have become my fans on Twitter and often leave comments on my hubs. Truth be told, though, there are also Hubbers I don’t like as much. That’s life though. I’ve found that staying out of the HubPages forum is a great way to avoid the more toxic element. Don’t get me wrong; there are plenty of nice people who frequent the forums. But unless I have a support issue I’m researching, I stay away. Your mileage may vary, though, so if you like to mix socializing with money-making; those connections are definitely available on HubPages.

I have also found HubPages management to be helpful, and any issues have been resolved quickly by writing to their support team. But be forewarned: HubPages is picky. If one of your hubs doesn’t have what they perceive to be value, you’ll probably be penalized by a lower HubScore or even being unpublished until you alter it. This is how HubPages keeps their good standing with Google, so in the long run their pickiness is great for everyone who builds good content.

I hope this overview has helped you evaluate whether HubPages is right for you. If you join, please feel free to stop by any of my hubs and say hi.

Collaborating with other writers online to guest post on blogs, write ebooks, and promote each others’ work improves the quality of my writing, but more importantly, it breaks the monotony of working in a vacuum.

You know what I mean. If you write, even if you also have an outside job, you write in a vacuum. Just you and the computer. You shut out your family, friends, and pets to focus on writing. Writing online is a solo gig. Or is it?

Are you writing online for content sites,  your own blog, or a combination of these? Hopefully you diversify your efforts, but one thing is for sure: individuals are in for tougher times this year when competing online for readers.

It’s inevitable. The tides of search engine traffic are shifting toward larger content aggregation sites and away from individual blogs and smaller websites. Big companies have the edge.

Not only that, but the trend is for these sites to increasingly pay a one-time fee (Demand Studios), or cap their payouts (Life123). That’s fine, but you may want to write individual articles and blog posts to build residual income, and you need a way to compete for traffic to your content to maintain that residual income.

Search engines favor sites with more pages, more content, more images, and more videos. Content aggregator sites deliver–and profit from delivering–so more of them join the fray, giving you more big competition.

Search engines also favor fresh content, and the big sites deliver that, too. You, as a solo writer, can post fresh content a few times a week. Content sites can post fresh content several times per hour.

So how can you compete? By collaborating with other writers. Co-ops have long offered refuge for the lone business person, whether farmer, artist, or writer by combining talents and goods for mutual profit. Profitable Collaboration can take the form of a large, formal, structured co-op, or simply two friends sharing resources.

One renowned blogger known as, “Grizzly” has mastered the art of the Internet co-op. You probably already know who I am referring to, but if not, check him out. And the Keyword Academy offers a similar type of Internet group for people to network and form mutually beneficial teams.

But you don’t need to join a formal group to find others who want to collaborate. A few months ago, I met some good writers and like-minded people on a writing forum. We formed a Google Group to help each other learn, to promote each others’ articles, and to share ideas.

Each group member who invested time in the project saw significant increases in blog and article traffic, and we even improved our writing and research skills. We introduced each other to our own networks and formed new friendships and partnerships. We boosted each others’ morale, and we are all better for it.

Sounds nice, huh? Well, it is. But collaborating is no longer a nicety or a luxury. If you plan to grow your business by writing online, collaborating is now essential. The big sites are getting bigger, and you need to “get bigger” to compete. It’s like opening your coat when a mountain lion approaches you on a trail to scare it away. You’re not really bigger, you just look that way, thanks to collaborating with your coat.

While you can offer a level of quality and personal attention to readers that not many content mills can, readers have to find your voice among the rising tide of content. By collaborating with other writers, you increase your visibility and many other opportunities to learn and grow, while retaining (even increasing) your ability to provide quality, personal service to your readers. The Internet is like a mountain lion. It doesn’t know you’re not big if you look big.

Do you know how to find others you can work well with to form collaborative teams? Here are a few tips that have worked for me:

1. Start with a sense of generosity of spirit. Just give. I mean, be smart about it, but if you’re dealing with quality, ethical people, it’s not going to kill you to promote their stuff. Give them links. Share that inside info you just learned. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at the results.

2. Watch forums and read articles and blogs by other writers. Participate in forums. You can always find an  eHow member or Warrior Forum person to learn from. When you find a writer online whose style and quality resonate with you, subscribe to their blog or article feed. Leave positive, constructive comments for them. Write to them personally. It takes time for both parties to get a sense of trust and compatibility, so give it time before suggesting a joint project.

3. Be honest about your own strengths and weaknesses. Choose partners whose assets and liabilities complement your own so you can learn from each other. Or team up with someone who is also strong in your niche to boost your power exponentially. Or if someone just has you outclassed, be a groupie. Just don’t be a creepy groupie.

I’m a big Ian Lurie fan, and he doesn’t even know I exist. And no, we’re not collaborating, but you can bet I’m learning from him, and I may find another Ian Lurie groupie to partner with based on our mutual interest. That guy can really turn a phrase. Which leads to my final point…

4. Appreciate and praise others who deserve your admiration. If I tell you that someone else is phenomenal, it doesn’t take away from my own phenominalness. It’s like love. The more you give, the more there is to go around. So start by giving, and remember to ask, too. We all want to be needed. And we are all going to need each other this coming year more than ever.

5. Keep your standards high, and ego low. And look for others who do the same. One reason the previously-mentioned group excelled was that each member was as willing to follow as they were to lead. I started the group, but another natural leader emerged and took the group to greater heights than it might otherwise have gone.

Recently, new opportunities for collaboration have arisen for me, mostly connected to previous networking partners. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle that will improve your life and your writing indefinitely.

So don’t wait, collaborate!

And may you have your happiest, most productive and profitable New Year ever writing online.

P.S. An extra special thanks to the most brilliant and generous collaborators ever, Fritz, Marty, Brian, Karbyn, Ann, Robin, Howie, Jason, Ellen, Barkha, AJ, and all the other friends and partners, new and ‘old’ alike, who I have been, and continue to be, blessed to know. Here’s to teaming up for a successful year ahead.

A little background first, in case you are wondering what even qualifies me to make such predictions: As a web content writer for several years now, I have been writing for user-generated content residual income sites like Examiner, BellaOnline, Info Barrel and eHow for only six months. But in that time, I have collaborated with other writers to compile and analyze our statistical data gathered by writing for some of these sites.

Before I began writing online, I spent a year in graduate school majoring in database technologies. I taught database engineering for a corporate education center at a local college, while also working as a data analyst and database developer.

Don’t get me wrong—I am no math whiz. Data analysis is about knowing how to get the computer to do your math for you, to learn things you may otherwise not have suspected were true.

But enough about that. Here are my top 4 predictions for the future of content sites and content writers who write online to build residual income, based on my research and first-hand observations:

1. The law of supply and demand will prevail. More content=less demand. Consumers can be pickier with more to choose from. And when Internet consumers are pickier, search engines must follow suit, so online content quality will improve, and soon. Articles will be pre-screened by qualified editors, or their content sites will fail.

To meet this demand, how will the search engines deliver better results from content sites? For one, search engines are beginning to learn to understand that valuable, relevant content is fresh and is surrounded by related valuable content. They also observe and analyze traffic patterns.

When consumers search for medical advice online and find an eHow article at the top of the results page with a Mayo Clinic article below that, and theck click on the second site instead of the first, how long can it be before the search engines realize that it means eHow is not a generally trusted resource for medical advice? Thus, Mayo Clinic’s site will rise to the top and eHow’s medical advice will go where it belongs.

2. Those user-generated content sites that treat their writers well while maintaining quality content, will gain substantial traffic. Greater readership traffic will follow greater quanitities of top-quality content. And those sites that don’t appreciate their writers will fall off the face of the virtual earth. Quickly.

The economy is improving, or so “they” say. Many writers who flocked to content sites in the last year or two in hopes of paying for groceries with residual income, will go back to work as job opportunities grow. Those left will be writers who publish valuable content and can make a living doing so.

When now-plentiful web content writers become a scarcer commodity, the supply-and-demand pendulum will swing back, and presto. The only user-generated content sites that continue to profit will be those who treat their writers well.

3. This is a biggie. Search engines will begin ranking individual writers, rather than entire sites. I am pretty sure that Google already knows whether user ID Herbs4U on site XYZ writes lame articles with spammy affiliate links, or whether they write timely, relevant alternative medicine articles.

The search engines’ ability to determine who that writer is across several content platforms will increase, especially as that person builds backlinks and leaves various tracks across cyberspace.

It’s possible that someday—probable, even—that when a searcher finds a Squidoo lens offering medical advice at the top of their search results, it will be because the search engine trusts the writer’s reputation, and knows that their content is more relevant to your query than anything Johns’ Hopkins or Mayo Clinic offers.

4. Plagiarism will get worse. Much worse. So plan for it. There are many sites, in many countries, that exist to steal your content, and it’s becoming more rampant. Google can take three weeks now just to look at a copyright violation complaint,  so imagine how long it will take as this problem continues to increase exponentially—and it will.

What does this all mean for you? If you write high-quality, relevant content online, you will have more and better options in the future. Sites that are transparent about their revenue-sharing model will force other content sites to do the same if they want to compete for the best writers.

Some strategies to consider:

1. If you specialize in any niche topics, especially if you also write about other, unrelated topics, then build separate IDs for each niche on each platform for which you write. Create user IDs with keywords to tell the search engines what your articles are about. Stay on topic. That’s one reason Examiner plays well with Google.

2. Build a blog for each of your niches to reinforce your brand. Own your blog. Do your homework. Invest in yourself.

3. If you do not want to delete your existing articles from sites that are having PR issues, leave them up. Re-write those articles and publish them on sites that treat you better and reward your investment and trust in them. You can probably optimize them more effectively the second time around, anyway.

4. Protect your content. Watermark your videos and graphics, and learn how to monitor for others plagiarizing your content. Learn how to enforce your rights. Educate yourself and take the time to protect your source of residual income. Supply and demand, again—if there are 20 copies of your article online, how much is your original worth? Not enough.

Another way to protect your content is to edit your articles and videos before you delete them from content sites to say, “Deleted by author.” I did this with several of mine before deleting them from a content site, and they were unaccountably reinstated later by that site’s staff. I had already re-posted a few on other platforms, so it is clear to anyone reading the deleted articles that they are the obsolete versions, so there are no duplicate content or perceived plagiarism issues for me to contend with.

And by the way, there is one additional, crucial step I recommend before deleting your videos. First create a small .txt file on your computer, type, “video” in it, save it, then rename it with a video extension such as, “.flv” and upload it to replace your original. You’ll thank me for this when In(dot)com can only show a black screen in place of your video that they claim as theirs someday!

And finally, stay informed by monitoring user forums of the content sites for which you write, or plan to write. Keep in mind there will always be a few disgruntled members on any site, but when you spot consistent forum themes of non-payment and non-communication…well, you’ll know what to do.

Here’s wishing you and yours a joyful holiday season, and a profitable New Year!

I want to encourage comments and offer you some value in return for your time here. And while this blog is relatively new, the domain itself is 7 years old (from my days as a database developer), and it does pretty well for itself in terms of getting indexed quickly and ranking well for search terms.

So I added a plugin for WordPress called, simply, “Do Follow.” The Do Follow plugin is easy to install, and if you have a WordPress blog, this is a great option.

So. The Catch.

The catch is that I moderate my comments, and only comments with actual value, and that indicate the commenter has actually read the post, will be approved. In other words, no spam, and nothing weird, hateful, yada yada yada.

Yesterday, I was reading an article about Google Wave’s cool features on 12Words, when I noticed the “Blog Comments and Spam Policy” posted by 12Words’ author, Chowdary. It expressed my own intentions so well, that I asked Chowdary for permission to plagiarize it, or at least paraphrase it (which is the same thing, unless you have permission), and he kindly agreed.

So without further ado, if you plan to comment on Crunchy Data, The Content Writer, please read my “Comments and Spam Policy” first.

And if I find in the future that there are too many comments to continue this, I will try to leave the existing do-follow links in place.

Thank you for reading Crunchy Data’s The Content Writer!

No matter which content venue you publish on, it’s always a good idea to paste your article’s URL into Google’s AdWords External Keywords tool to see what Google thinks your article is about, and use SEO Quake’s Density Analysis (Firefox toolbar) for a comprehensive view of your content optimization that may surprise you.
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You constantly work to optimize your articles when writing online for content sites, so maybe you’ve wondered whether comments on your articles affect their SEO (search engine optimization). You’re writing articles online to make money online—ideally to earn long-term residual income. And you want to increase traffic to your online articles, because you make more money when your articles get more traffic.

It makes sense, right?

Well, you may not realize this, but ALL of the content on the page where your article is published affects your articles’ SEO. And any content that you didn’t add to the page with your specific keywords in mind has the potential to lower your article’s search engine rankings.

When you write articles for web content sites, your article is only one small piece of the page.

There are links to ads, related articles, non-related articles that you may have written—all content that you may have little or no control over. And although it is generally near the bottom of the page after your article, which makes it a bit less significant in terms of SEO, the comment section is almost always completely out of your control. (Unless you are in the habit of commenting on your own articles.)

Though you may not have given it much thought before, you should account for comments in your article optimization strategy to ensure strong search engine rankings and maximum profit potential for your online content.

High search engine rankings mean that your article is listed as one of the first that searchers see in their search engine results page. And for each place that your article drops in its search engine rankings, clicks on that article will drop exponentially, reducing its residual income potential.

So how can you improve content optimization, or article SEO, when you cannot control all of the content on the page? That’s easy—sort of—until it comes to accounting for comments. The reason that comments make article SEO more difficult is that they are the one page variable (other than ad placement and relevance), that is most likely to change over time. And you cannot control that change.

To optimize articles written for content sites such as InfoBarrel, HubPages, or eHow, you need to first evaluate the page variables. That is, all of the content on the page, and not just your article’s text. This includes: related articles listed by the site, related articles listed by you, categories, even your user ID and bio, in some cases. The search engine spiders watch this, so you should, too.

Of course you want to ensure that your ads on the page relate well to your article’s keywords. Ideally, that will follow naturally over time when you effectively research and apply relevant and profitable keywords to your articles.

To find out whether comments are helping, hurting, or not affecting your articles in the search engine rankings, you can do a bit of sleuthing with online SEO tools. The first tool to use is Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool. Enter the URL of your article into the address window that appears when you click the radio button on the left labeled, “website content.”

Google will then return a list of keywords (in blue, just below where you typed your article URL) that it determines are related to your article. It also lists those keywords and keywords related to those keywords down the page. You should get a good sense from this exercise as to whether or not Google understands the topic of your article.

Next, visit this great SEO tool and enter your article’s URL under “Page URL:” If you are writing online and have never tried analyzing article keywords with a tool like this before, you’re in for a surprise. If you happen to have any eHow articles to analyze, especially ones with lots of comments, start with one of those. Spend some time reviewing all the data that this tool crunches for you.

You might even want to do that now in a new tab or window, then read the rest of this post.

Surprised? I’ll bet you never thought of other people’s user IDs as keywords before, did you? How do you feel when you realize that this tool, which mimics a search engine spider, thinks the phrase, “Great info. 5*!!!” is one of your article’s top keyword phrases? Now imagine what that is doing to your article optimization efforts. Does it make you want to go “friend” a bunch of other users and ask them to comment on your articles?

Look at it this way. Those users can’t help you anyway, unless they link to your articles from their articles, blogs, or websites. They can’t click on your ads without landing you in hot water, because that could be viewed as click fraud. And if they comment on your “Dog Sweaters” article saying, “Great dog sweater ideas. I love pet sweaters. Dog sweaters are wonderful,” you could end up with something that looks like keyword stuffing, meaning the search engines will think you are gaming them and penalize your article. So think twice about that.

That said, here’s the flip side of whether comments hurt or help your articles’ SEO: If you tend to write in a specific niche about a potentially controversial topic, or a topic that garners dozens of questions and comments every time you post, then THIS is when comments can come in handy. Because if your articles begin to draw a true following of readers, especially readers who are not necessarily writers on the same content site and who subscribe to and add backlinks to your articles, that traffic can build on itself, thereby increasing your search engine ranking.

And when those readers start linking to your articles, and then their readers and the search engines follow those links, you’ve got viral marketing for your articles that will increase your web traffic like nothing you could have achieved all by yourself.

But whether you decide that you want comments or don’t want comments, you will get them. Your article will catch someone’s eye, and they will comment with something completely spammy, unrelated, or over-the-top keyworded, and then what?

Then you review your article again to determine whether you need to edit it to adjust your keyword ratio or not. And don’t worry. Editing your article can actually help it. There is an upcoming ebook about article SEO that teaches you how edit keywords effectively. I got a sneak peek, and I highly recommend it. I promise to tell you as soon as it’s released how and where you can get it for yourself.

Here is how you can decide whether your article’s comments have skewed its keyword ratio enough that you need to edit it:

1. Check the ads on your article’s page. Are they relevant? Are they the ads you were hoping for? If yes, leave well enough alone. If not, edit your article.
2. Look at your article’s URL in Google’s AdWords Tool again. Does Google still get it?
3. Use the SEO Workers’ Tool again to evaluate your article and determine whether and how much your keyword ratio has changed, and adjust accordingly, if needed.

It is a good idea to crunch the data (I know. How obvious was that phrase?), using several methods for a big-picture sense of how your article is doing. If your analysis still shows relevant keywords, and the article is earning a good residual income for you, then don’t mess with success. And if you decide you don’t want comments on your new articles, try creating a new user ID and staying under the social radar to find out for yourself whether article comments hurt or help your content optimization goals for your articles’ best SEO.