We like to tweak everything and try our hardest to make it work better. No guarantees of course that this will help, but it should improve the way the javascript is rendered on the page.

CloudFlare also offers some protection from botnets and other types of exploits. In theory they block a lot of comment spammers as well – but only time will really tell about that.

In the mean time – if you have any problems with getting through to the site, please let us know right away. There is the possibility with false positives to block some legitimate users out.

So far though it is doing a great job and keeping a lot of spammers at bay.

Remember put the reader first – always.

We implemented a retroactive block today on all articles below a certain length, and we might do this again – upon closer review of those articles effected. If you articles were effected, consider modifying them to bring them back above the current 350 word floor.

Remember a minimum word length is like minimum building code – it should not be the target that you are striving to achieve. A house builder who says “we build to minimum code” is someone who wants to do the bare minimum to get the job “done” get their check and get onto the next project. Just like you might not want that person to build your home, readers want more knowledge in these articles – so please try to write a few more sentences and you will do great.

I read a post on another site yesterday that was linked from a companies Facebook wall – it was on a well-known content site – but it went so far as to tell you how to boil water (fill a pot with water, place on stove, cover, the higher the flame the faster it boils) etc. I wouldn’t want anyone to write as though you are presuming your reader to have a low IQ.

So remember – put the reader first – promotion second.

Perhaps the giving page type challenge that DonorsChoose offers is not the right kind of tool to motivate readers of this site to click and fund a project.

Any ideas on increasing the reader response rate?

We would love to see someone else donate something through the giving page – so when the contest is over and we make the funding we were planning on, we aren’t the only donor. I did check into a few of the projects listed on the page and a lot are in the completed section. So while perhaps very few donors have been tracked through the giving page we created, there are a lot of the projects getting funded. Tracking is just tracking – but the important thing is that projects are funded.

DonorsChoose allows people to pick from a wide selection of education related projects available for funding.  You pick where the donation goes and whom gets impacted.  Teachers and educators around the country can post up projects.

Projects tend to range from smaller things like a few books, to very large projects involving some pretty high-tech stuff.  Take a look around, see what is available for funding in your area, or in your home town.  We found this site about a year ago after hearing about it from Tim Ferriss (author of 4 hour work week) – which is a great book if you haven’t read it.

DonorsChoose also allows you to create giving pages, so you can compete with your friends in a friendly competition or just select projects that you feel strongly about – and let your friends/readers/customers etc know about it.  While not every project is perfect there are a lot of great requests on the site and best of all you can actually see what effect your donation is having.

An automatic donation to DonorsChoose is included with every gift, in the checkout area, you can select what percentage (or none) you wish to donate directly to DonorsChoose to fund their operational expenses.  If you are the donor that funds the final portion of the project they will send you thank you notes if you request.  For those who are looking to donate in memory or honor of someone that’s an option as well.

So now onto the $25 gift cards – we have a limited number of these available – I spent sometime thinking up ways to give these out – but the important thing is that you get one and use it.  So the big criteria is that it gets used.  So here’s how this will work.  The first five people who post a comment below and link to a project on donors choose that you support – will get a gift card.

If there is already five comments here – with “winners” – then post a comment as well and then we will draw the commentator to give away the others.  The drawing will take place on April 7, 2011.

We considered turning this into a writing contest with one entry going for every article about the charity of your choice you submitted – if you like that format of a contest – please post a reply or send us an email.

Remember it’s always good to give back.

Curious how DonorsChoose ranks on CharityNavigator — 4 stars (top rating)?

UPDATE 4/8/11:
The contest is now over, thank you to everyone who participated. We have given away the gift cards that were donated as well as the ones that we funded.

There have been a lot of other changes going on in the background here – and we will post an update post soon.

We review accounts every day and the queue is well – quite long – so if you would like to be bumped up – just ask – if your wondering whether or not it has already been reviewed – just check any properly formatted html link in your resource box.

While not submission guidelines, here are some other general tips.

• Put the reader first, think what is helpful for them
• Write first, promote second
• Fill out your profile, every pen name has a profile page which can have 7 links plus 1500 characters.  You can use the 1500 characters as you see fit to tell others about you.  Each profile page is linked to from every article you submit.  As you submit more articles, there are exponentially more links to the profile page.  If you haven’t ever filled out one, login to your account, on the right, look for a link that says edit public profile.  Select the pen name you want to edit (even if you have only one), then it will say now editting “pen name’s profile” and fill it out.
• Submit persistently and consistently.  Article Marketing is not a quick fix, but rather it works over the long run.  Submit articles on a regular basis and for a long time.  If you have thirty articles and aren’t getting any more, then submit 1 every other day for 60 days, rather than 30 at once.  If you plan on writing 4 articles a month, submit one a week.  If you are planning a marketing on slaught with thousands of articles, divide it up and submit a few per day rather than 100.  There are many reasons for this, and without getting too technical, but it has to do with how things are linked from the home page, the category page, profile page and recent article lists.
• If you have a problem with the site, please email us first and see if we can work it out.  Sometimes there are issues we aren’t aware of  and other things can be done simple.
• Email address switch – want to change the email address on the account – we have to do that by hand – so email us from the current account email address.
• Fake postal address – if you used a fake address, please login and update it.  We have removed hundreds of accounts for this.

Keep up the great work and keep up the wonderful articles.

Thank you to the nice person who was kind enough to call us and let us know that she couldn’t access the site. Thank you as well to the authors who emailed because they couldn’t login. For those who jumped to conclusions that we banned your whole account – I’m not sure what to say – did you do something wrong that would lead us to ban your account?

Onward and Upward thats what I always say!

We hope to resolve this issue and go back to testing out cloudflare in the future.

To those of you whom continue to spam our site, it’s getting old…

We have a number of projects in the works to expand the offerings of the site

Spam removal continues and will be an ongoing project. In general we remove everything that promotes illegal activities, adult related topics, online gambling, sports betting, pharmacies, etc. If you write about these topics, thats cool, but please don’t submit them here. If you think that your account has been banned for one of these reasons feel free to contact us via email and we are happy to work with you.

In general our editors look for some basics in order to remove nofollow from an account these are basic guidelines,

1) Write quality articles
2) Don’t write similar articles – no two articles should say the same thing. Don’t just use different synonyms to say the same thing, stop, delete it, and write a new article.
3) Use article titles that are helpful – titles that are just keyword phrases look like spam and are often removed as such without review. A good title catches the reader’s eye and encourages them to click the link and read your article.
4) Link to quality sites. If you are writing articles and promoting a web presence it should be just that, a presence. We will not be removing nofollow for people who link to sites under construction, expired domains, and thin poorly created sites that have a little bit of content and ads, but no real service.
5) Varied article length, no one I’ve ever met can put 400 words exactly into an article every single time, if your article length’s aren’t varied, its a tell tale sign you are manipulating something.
6) Don’t start articles with “in this article” “this article is about” “below you will find” – no one wants to know what is in the article, start the article. If you picked the right title then they already know what is in the article.
7) Not mandatory – but suggested – use article tags (keywords) that are actually helpful and not too long, in general article tags should be 1 to 3 word phrases separated by comma when submitted.
No domain names in article titles
9) A legitimate pen name, not something like 124124124 or john1232 or susizeqpublic – as we find these – the accounts are banned

This list is by no means complete, but some of the general guidelines.

Account reviews are on going and if your an active author, who is still seeing the nofollow on your resource box links – email us right away and include a link to one of your articles. Remember nofollow is removed per pen name, so if you recently added more pen names, sadly you will have to contact us. Good news for users of Content Crooner (and some of Distribute Your Articles) users – we have already removed the nofollow on a vast backlog of accounts based from these services.

Remember when you submit links in your article resource box (about the author section) you should always include links in html formatting, if you do not, they will not be linked in the rss feeds etc.

Thats all for now – let us know any questions.

By disabling several plugins and re-enabling them one at a time it seems as though the AdCopy plugin is not working corectly with the latest version of WordPress. While this is too bad, I’m just glad we discovered it and were able to figure out what was causing the blank post pages to show up.

Anyone else have this issue? AdCopy was something we had been testing, but we can’t seem to track revenue on it anyway, so not really sure if it is worth keeping around.

Thoughts comments?

Several of them make mention to “scraping” software that crawls through the search results and lifts phone numbers, names and email addresses off of web pages.

It blows my mind every day at how few of these marketers are familiar with the FTC laws. The laws concerning recorded calls, the laws concerning automated email harvesting and the laws concerning the DoNotCall list.

Here a list of a few of the people who have been calling – it seems as though Seattle, WA is the main source of all these calls.

206-337-9022, 206-337-8922, 206-339-0358, 214-614-8164, 270-596-0594, 800-927-8580, 206-339-0687, 206-333-0099, 206-426-0544, 323-386-4756, 206-339-3115, 206-888-5364, 206-337-9266, 206-337-3204, 702-208-7382

That is just a few of the numbers that we have detected these annoying, time wasting calls from.

So pretty much if you are a work from home marketer, pick up the phone and call people. Using these automated voice broadcasting tool playing the same darn recorded message with no way of talking to a live person and a removal system that DOES NOT work at all, just makes you the marketer look terrible.

If you also receive these calls, you can file a complaint against them at the DoNotCall website, as well as make sure you are on the donotcall list, voice broadcasters are supposed to scrub against this list, however it seems, this company doesn’t.

Also, if you get these messages, a lot of them you can “be removed” from their list by pressing 9…

Update 3/29/2010 – More phone numbers
206-339-4237, 206-203-3823, 206-350-1812, 206-338-3481, 270-596-0584, 206-495-6561, 206-339-8475, 888-591-1068, 970-290-0652, 206-202-4842, 623-321-3411, 206-203-2524, 888-675-8796, 206-426-3158, 214-614-8164, 951-262-3309

Update 6/22/2010 – Even More phone Numbers from the last few days
603-659-9999, 206-350-7890, 206-666-6416, 206-426-2468, 206-666-3410, 206-337-4517, 213-995-3975, 206-426-2609, 860-770-1032, 800-750-7149, 206-202-4416, 206-426-2609, 800-750-9147, 206-309-9445, 800-750-9149, 800-580-0054, 888-333-0398, 405-416-1899, 206-338-0763, 206-309-4191

Update 7/12/2010
866-639-2311, 561-404-0444, 206-309-9286, 206-337-9619, 206-426-2609, 206-202-7340

These messages were mainly for people promoting network marketing, mlm, work from home opportunities of various names and programs.

Updated 8/17/2010
206-426-4362 belongs to Peter in Greenville, he was calling to ask me how it was going promoting TruVita (which I’m not in), then he called again a minute later to ask how it was going promoting Mannatech, which I’m not in. Gosh don’t you love auto dialers from scraped lists? Good thing its likely against current FTC law, too bad not as many marketers follow that law…

Should we discover them, we will ban your account. The most recent was someone going under pen name “Dr Mital John” – aka Parveen Kumar. This person stole articles from other sites and posted them here, word for word with a few link changes.

Seriously folks, it is not that difficult to write about something that you know about or hire someone else to do it.

The spam clean up continues and we will be happy to remove accounts from those who steal articles. Additionally if your email address bounces, please contact us so that we can update the account with a valid email address. We remove accounts on a regular basis due to bad email addresses.

ArticleSnatch.com has over 800,000 approved articles, and well over 100,000 that aren’t approved. Below you will find some tips to make sure that your articles end up in the approved pile as well as some tips that can help those articles get more traffic.

1) Article Title – the article title is the first thing a viewer sees and has a lot of impact whether or not they click on it. Too short and you have not given the reader enough information, too long and the opposite is true. Aim for 65 to 90 characters and be descriptive about what your article says. If your article is about great vacations, then “great vacation” would be the worst title ever, but “How To Have a Great Vacation With Your Family” might be better.

2) Article Length – often times people ask us how short can an article be, or what is the minimum length of an article. I think those people are looking at the approach of writing articles backwards. Instead write the article to say what you want it to, then stop and check the length. Articles below 250 words (and this might change) are denied automatically. Articles under 300 words are more likely to be removed with less scrutiny. The sweet spot is really closer to 400 or 500 words. But again, don’t add filler to just stuff your article and make it longer.

3) Article KeyWords / Tags – When you submit an article you can put several keywords in the keyword box. It is best to use keywords and keyword phrases with less than 3 words (or 4 words if you have to). Keywords should not include common words (and, or, if, the, to, etc) and they should be descriptive of what the article is actually about. When the topic pages are built, the words in the article tags/keyword section are factored in, but more importantly , the content of the article is also factored in. So tagging an article with google, when its about canon cameras probably wouldn’t be a good idea. Try to find 5 to 7 keyword or keyword phrases that best describe the article.

4) About the Author / Resource Box – These 500 characters at the end of the article are a great place for you to shine. This is the part where you want to write a bit about the author as well as a call to action. 3 properly formatted html links are allowed, and you should always use all three. One of them should be your domain name and with no anchor text – other than the domain name. For example http://www.articlesnatch.com/ would be a good link to include. The reason for this is that if someone decides to use the article on their site and they don’t include your anchor text links (which they are required to), then at least someone reading the article can still contact you.

Nofollow/Dofollow resource box links – this was put in place as part of a plan to recover from a strong Google Filter. But it is by no means permanent, if your account currently has nofollow links in the resource box, and you have submitted more than 5 articles, email webmaster AT articlesnatch DOT com, include the email address on the account and we will be happy to review the account and remove the nofollow. This is in place to discourage fly by night spammers and those looking to promote inappropriate topics on the site, while pushing the better, stronger articles to the top. Since this was implemented, traffic is up, indexing is up, indexing rates are up.

5) Links – Policy used to dictate that links were only allowed in the resource box, however that has changed. Before October 2009, the links in the body of the article were filtered out and not displayed. Now they are allowed. However, stuffing an article with lots of links, would still be a spammy technique and likely would get your account shut down. So while this is allowed and encouraged, it should always be done with the viewer in mind. Ask yourself first, will this help my reader? If not, then don’t include it. The links in the body of the article are currently nofollow and will likely stay that way.

6) Formatting – If you write your articles in Microsoft Word or similar word processor, it would be best if you first copied the article and pasted it into a plain text editor, then copy it again and paste it into ArticleSnatch.com, this will prevent any of the formatting issues caused by Microsoft. MS Word often inserts characters that can’t be properly stored in the database, and this can cause other functions of the site to break. MS Word is also the number one reason why links in the resource box get broken. We are looking to implement a new editor when you submit articles to help fix this issue.

7) Category – picking the right category also improves the likelihood of your desired reader finding the article. Not only are the RSS feeds of each category distributed widely, but it makes it easier for a reader to find what they are looking for. If you are using a software program to submit articles, just double check and make sure that the articles go in the right category. If you fail to pick one, it will be put into the Uncategorized category along with all the other misplaced articles. Additionally when we review your account, if most of your articles are there, we will ask that you fix it.

Building Links – An integral part of any successful article marketing strategy should be to build some links to the articles that you are submitting. While to some this may sound odd, the more links to the article you wrote, the more chances there are for people and search engines to find that article. Some easy way you can do this is to use a social bookmarking tool like – http://www.OnlyWire.com – which allows you to store your bookmarking accounts there and then use one tool in your browser toolbar to submit links to several sites. Another idea is to use RSS aggregators to distribute the feed of the category which you submit to, topic feeds and your author feed. Most of these feeds are all linked at the bottom of the article with the rss icons. To read more about RSS aggregation check out TipJar – this explains how to do it, etc. Remember the RSS feed that is for your author profile, there is a snippet from the article as well as your resource box. That’s why it is even more important that your resource box include the links you want it to.

9) Pen Names – After you create your account, you need to create at least one pen name to submit articles. The pen name you use is what will be displayed on the article where it says “By: Name”. That is also linked to your profile page based on that pen name. As you might be able to imagine, the more articles under the same pen name, there more links there are to that profile page. So it is better to submit more articles under one pen name than it is to use separate pen names for each article. Some authors like to keep unrelated subjects on different pen names. Choice is yours. Also while you are logged in, click on “edit profile” and select the pen name profile to edit, here you can can add 5 links to sites of your choice as well as a 1500 character blurb that you want to appear on this profile page.

10) Appropriate Topics – articles that you wouldn’t want your five year old child to read, probably shouldn’t be submitted. If your article is about gambling, adult things, online pharma, illegal activities, hate, knock off items, etc – please don’t submit it. When we find articles about these topics we simply ban your entire account. So please don’t submit them in the first place, if you have already, please login and delete the articles.

11) Other Spam To Avoid – Avoid duplicate submissions, so if your article looks the same or similar to another one we have, it might be removed without notice. Avoid duplicate titles or similar titles. Also if you spin articles, consider stopping, but till you do, don’t submit two “spins” of the same article to the same site. It benefits no one. Keyword stuffing and poorly written articles are also frowned upon and will be removed without notice.

If you have any questions please ask, either here in comments, using the contact form or by email. Our staff is here to answer your questions and help you be successful in your article marketing efforts. When you leave comments below, please remember that the name field is for your name and not a keyword.

update: we have a temporary fix in place, by disabling the gzip output, things should be working better.

Update: – everythng is back up and running

I’m surprised that someone would have such audacity to do so.

The issue of course has been resolved, but it is still surprising to see some of the steps that some people will go through to try to get the word out about their site.

Even worse, was that Mr. Bhol didn’t even bother to include links in the resource box, rather just in the body of the article, where up till a few months ago, they would have been filtered out and not shown. Clearly he’s show his claim of 3 years experience to be kind of invalid.

Anyway enough about that guy.

The editorial team is continuing to review accounts and remove things from the site as well as keep approving the new stuff. So as always, if you have any questions feel free to comment below or email us.

Just got done fixing the site after some hacker at 5:33 EST from an ip address of 211.72.36.100 decided to hack our site and insert a random redirect code. I guess he wanted to earn a little christmas cash as well. Oh well Hackers are losers and thats that. Not much else to do right.

We have worked on securing the hole that was found to reduce the risk of that in the future. Pretty sure the hole is wordpress (thanks guys). Not that many people would be surprised by that….

The editorial team over here has been working hard as well to get more authors reviewed, but if you would like us to review your account, please send an email to webmaster AT articlesnatch Dot com. We will take a look at it.

If you haven’t logged in a while, login, check some of your links. We are not approving anyone linking to parked domains, for sale domains, or domains that redirect you to 80 different places.

If you have articles in your account that you wouldn’t want a 5 year old to read, you might want to think about removing them. We have been working to remove all content like that and sometimes people just get everything banned if there is too much bad stuff. These topics also include replica junk, pharma, online casinos, etc. If you know that you have submitted those in the past, please login and delete them.

Have a great day and look forward to hearing your feedback, feel free to coment below or email us. If you do leave a comment, don’t use a keyword as your name, we will just mark it as spam…

Well we have stopped reading these comments and just mark them all as spam. So if you want to leave a productive comment, feel free. If you are just looking for another anchor text link to your likely spam filled site, we will just mark it as spam…

that’s enough rant for now, perhaps later I’ll post about the “Entertainment” company that sent an email accusing us of copyright violations in regards to an article that they hired a firm in India to submit. So they hire out someone to write and submit the article and then accuse us of distributing copies of their film. What on earth is going on.

So far we have reviewed authors who have contributed 74000 total articles (UPDATE 12/14 9pm 108,700 articles). Our moderation team is working to get everyone reviewed, but with over 100,000 authors it is a time consuming process.

These changes have been called drastic and an over reaction, that may be true in some authors minds, but instead of over reacting, remember that the changes are TEMPORARY. Remember a link that is followed but on a page that is not in the index doesn’t matter, so pl

We have had a few injection attacks as well, currently we have caught injections from astralarena.com and atsignart.com, if you see something that doesn’t look right, or acts funny, notify us immediately so our staff can take a look.

We are working to remove the nofollow from every legitimate author on the site that might have gotten mixed in the with the bad.

Find something that looks like it doesn’t belong on the site, contact us and we will take a look.

Got a suggestion or want to see something new? send us an email or reply below, be sure to read the comment policy.

We can now review your account, note whether your write quality content and link to quality sites – if so – then the nofollow will be removed from your links. If you write terrible articles, and link to bad neighborhoods, etc, then we can mark the account as reviewed and leave the nofollow in place.

Currently we are reviewing authors based on the number of articles submitted, as well as the date of the last login. So authors who are submitting articles regularly will be reviewed first. If you would like to skip the queue, please feel free to email us at webmaster at articlesnatch dot com. (piece that back together.)

This will also remove the nofollow from your profile page — you did take the time to edit your profile right? You are allowed several links there and several paragraphs of space for you to write whatever you want about you and your company, etc. That profile page is linked from every article you submit, so its likely a good idea to get that filled out.

We are working on an option for you to opt out of having the in text ads from showing up on your site – these are the ads served by kontera within the body of the article. If you would like them blocked from your account, we can take note of that, and we are working to get it implemented shortly. If there is just one advertiser you want to see blocked, email us and we can take a look at that as well.

New Feature: Automagically Converting Urls to Links

We have turned on a function that will take a url in the resource box and turn it into a link, so if you forget to include the actual html code for your url, the system will turn it into a link on rendering. This will only work if your url looks something like http://www.articlesnatch.com it won’t work without the http.

As always we are open to feedback and making improvements to the site, email us, leave a comment, etc. Remember we have a comment policy.