More Steps to Get Your Article Declined

Here are some other faults I've come across with submitted articles that can get them rejected.

Problems With Pen Names

If you submit articles you've written on the different article directories around, you will more than likely find that these allow you to have a username, which you use to login, and at least one pen names, which are shown as the name of the author of the article. Now, I've seen a few faults here.

The initial fault is usually caused when you already have an account at an article site, then join an article submission program such as iSnare. The distribution service will generate you a new account, and in some cases, if the pen name you use with the submission service is the same as one you already have at the site, you may end up with a blank as the distribution services pen name, as the identical one is declined. This means that the ability of search engines to spider your articles is significantly decreased, as there are no links to "About the Author" or similar pages. Some directories will decline your article should this happen.

Next, using your site URL as your pen name is often not appreciated either, so just don't do it. In addition, quite a number of sites will reject articles written by something other than First Name Last Name, so, although conditions do alter from site to site, it's doubtful that any will object to a pen name of, for example, "John Smith", whilst will reject or remove articles by "mysite.com" or "The SEO Guru". Just stick with a standard name, even if it's not your actual one, and you will avoid any problems like this.

Bad Usage of Article Spinners

You may not have heard of services such as these, or you may use something similar without realizing it. There are a number of different versions around, but what they all have in common is that they are designed to take one article, and make a number of different versions of it. The differences may be only minor, but the concept is to make a variety of "unique" articles to avoid duplicate content filters.

Now, there is nothing wrong with doing this, but there are wrong ways of doing it. If the spinner replaces words or phrases with variations, for example, "In the beginning" could also be phrased as "To start with", after doing this for an article and producing a number of variants, read each one through to make sure they still make sense. It's quite easy to produce gibberish if you don't, and most decent article directories don't like to publish gibberish. If an article needs tweaking, do so manually. Far better to make sure you spend a bit of time now on the article, then having to fix it after rejection.

The next problem is if you generate a batch of 20 variant articles, submit each article to a different site. Therefore, 20 articles to 20 sites. Or submit them to groups of directories, one article to 10 sites, the next to a further 10 etc. Don't submit all 20 variants to the same directory. That will probably just get them rejected, and you may get your account deleted for annoying the site owner.

Submission guidelines, and what an article directory or site will accept or decline do change, sometimes quite substantially, from directory to directory, but if you are cautious, you'll get less articles rejected.

Adrian Kennelly runs DirectoryGold Web Directory and Article Directory. See it for more articles on Writing Articles.