Eureka! I Have Found It! The Worst Article Ever Written!

[mikemcmillan]

Eureka! I Have Found It! The Worst Article Ever Written!

Okay, I'm here to blow off some steam tonight. I need to do it; I'll feel better after I do it; I'll be glad I did it.

First, I make no claim as to being a great writer. However, I do endeavor to write with some modicum of passion and sincerity. Through the years I have tried to learn and practice good writing skills. Today I make 100% of my income from writing. My 12th grade high school English teacher would be shocked sober to learn that I do.

Two summers ago when I was in New York I bought a little booklet titled, Walking Tours of New York City. There was map and a tour that would take you by some of the hangouts of famous writers and I decided to go for it. I went to the White Horse Tavern where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. I sat there for an hour nursing a cold one--taking notes. I felt inspired just to be there. I walked by Allen Ginsberg's mother's home where he wrote Kaddish. It made me think of the first time I read Ginsberg's Howl (“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”)--a poem that made me cry real tears. It was vulgar and nasty, fueled by Benzedrine and LSD--but it also had a beauty that I respected.

These men, despite their foibles, were men of substance. They were extremely gifted writers. I respect that and I am frustrated knowing that I can never write with the lithe beauty and fluidity they commanded. It hurts me to know and understand my limitations.

One thing I write is articles. I do this to generate traffic and provide a little link juice to some of my pages--but I do it mainly to generate traffic. Tonight, I reached a milestone. I discovered what is, without question, the very worst article I have ever run across in my life. I won't name the directory I found it in, but it was not EZA.

The irony of the thing is that this article was promoting a piece of article spinning software. The links in the resource box pointed to the sales page for the product. I want to give you an excerpt of the article so you can realize the abhorrent terror that ran through my blood as I read it.

"The cape of article marketing is to win having the status of much exposure and credibility having the status of likely. The easiest way to organize this is by symbols tantalizing content and submitting it to having the status of many directories having the status of likely. xxxxxxxxx command help you generate thousands of backlinks with the aim of can deposit you up on behalf of a tremendous amount of exposure."

I am critiquing this article as is permissible under Title 17, U.S. code so don't rag on me about not having the author's permission to use this excerpt. And I am not providing the author's name because I sure the hell wouldn't want my name associated with a piece of head cheese like this.

This excerpt is the result of using article spinning software. I couldn't help but think of Dylan Thomas or Allen Ginsberg pondering for hours whether to use "that" or "which" in a line in their writing. Or spending hours to decide on whether they needed a semicolon or a dash in a particular line. And then I run across people who call themselves writers submitting rank and odius vomitum such as this article for public reading.

There may exist some article spinning software that works reasonably well out there. I am not familiar with any. But the real question is this: Who wins by spinning articles into this kind of hash? The article directory doesn't win. I will never go back to this one ever! The writer doesn't win: I will never read another article by this author. And the reader doesn't win--I didn't get a quality experience from reading this tripe and cow heel at all. Article spinning, in my opinion is a lose, lose, lose proposition.

And I have a word of warning to article directory owners. By letting this kind of trash permeate your directories, you risk losing readers--and publishers submitting their work to you. Remember Google's prime directive: To provide a quality experience for its users (searchers). I strongly suggest you make this your prime directive as well. When users of your article base become too frequently dissatisfied with the quality of the articles they find, they will look elsewhere.

I know many of you are very good article writers. I know many of you write all of your own articles and take great pride in them. My hat is off to you. I respect you and your body of work! But all of the monkey poo that is pouring into article directories these days hurts all of us. It gives us a bad name.

I had to get this off my chest.

[CDarklock]

Originally Posted by mikemcmillan

The writer doesn't win: I will never read another article by this author.

Joke is to being on the you! Many author which to write similar such thing is not to using the real names! Much article out here is making to by same the author but must to have differing of names on him. You are will reading articles by same the author and not to knows it! Laughing to his bank all the ways.

Oh, crap, it's contagious.

[Bev Clement]

Mike, there are so many bad articles around, it is difficult to find the worst. I once put an article about weight loss into a spinner, because someone asked me to test it. I did, and losing pounds became talk of losing a book per week, and then half a book per week.

I read a sample once which has to rank with the worst articles of all times as well.

[FifthDimension5]

half of the material found on the internet is all doctored/spinned, that is not by whom they claim to be from. Probably machine-written and some human adds a few texts here and there to make up for it. SO it is difficult to block them. Thats why article directory like ezine they read all articles manually to see if it sounds like spinned article that doesnt make sense. That said, if article marketing is done right, may be you can get visits and traffic from the article directories. But I wonder how microsoft, oracle, cisco, ebay, etc. have never used article marketing and yet they are all successful big companies arent they.

[Will Edwards]

Originally Posted by mikemcmillan

Eureka! I Have Found It! The Worst Article Ever Written!

I went to the White Horse Tavern where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. I sat there for an hour nursing a cold one--taking notes.

Hey Mike - you ain't never going to drink yourself to death taking a whole hour to drink a beer (lol).

Originally Posted by CDarklock

Joke is to being on the you! Many author which to write similar such thing is not to using the real names! Much article out here is making to by same the author but must to have differing of names on him. You are will reading articles by same the author and not to knows it! Laughing to his bank all the ways.

Oh, crap, it's contagious.

It took a while for the penny to drop - very witty reply!

Will

[JackPowers]

Originally Posted by FifthDimension5

half of the material found on the internet is all doctored/spinned, that is not by whom they claim to be from. Probably machine-written and some human adds a few texts here and there to make up for it. SO it is difficult to block them. Thats why article directory like ezine they read all articles manually to see if it sounds like spinned article that doesnt make sense. That said, if article marketing is done right, may be you can get visits and traffic from the article directories. But I wonder how microsoft, oracle, cisco, ebay, etc. have never used article marketing and yet they are all successful big companies arent they.

Ezine accept my spun articles all the time! Spun articles are gold. I can rank the same article several times on the first pages of Google with a little work, non-competetive keyword of course, but still.

Article spinning is a valuable tool, but you need a quality base article and quality iterations.

[CDarklock]

Originally Posted by Bev Clement

losing pounds became talk of losing a book per week, and then half a book per week.

Well, if you're not a fan of old Ezra...

[FranklinSoh]

CDarklock,

That was the funniest stuff I have read in a long time. I literally laughed out loud, though admittedly I was a little slow at getting the joke initially.

HAHAHA!

- FK

[Kezz]

Same here, between the improvised "post spinning" and the newest term added to my insult vocabulary; "Head cheese", I got two solid chuckles out of this thread.

[feefondo]

Here we go another battle about to spin or not to spin. Well there are spinners where you can make an article nice but unfortunately for the lazies out there a lot of work is still required to do it.

[Dawn Martin]

I'm no expert but this just confirms that you really should write everything yourself or at least check that it makes some sense.

Dawn

[TristanPerry]

Just found that article, it's an absolutely quality read (Easy enough to find with 1 second of Google searching, I won't name and shame though )

Some brilliant lines in it, my favourite though:

"You organize not take part in to be troubled in relation to training by hand to employ it having the status of it comes with a effortless outline, a built-in file so you can elect lexis to employ, and you can get by everything by hand to urge it the way you like."

The opening line is good also, since it says "article marketing" is good, but then calls it "shoddy" by accident

"Single of the easiest ways to urge traffic to your website is by article marketing. It is not the fastest, but it is uncomplicated and shoddy."

Amazing how some of these get approved. I guess it is best to stick to something like EZA, whereby they actually read what gets submitted.

EDIT: Researching a bit, this author has submitted the exact same article to the same directory about 8 times (it's unreadable just like this one) and all of them have been accepted? So same article, (basically) same title, same directory, same category. All 8 approved? How they get approved is beyond me. I've now just crossed that directory off my "To submit to" list.

EDIT 2: This isn't the fault of article spinning per se. Well, it *is* the fault of a very, very awful spinning too. However using a good article spinner (Power Article Rewriter, etc) which you - as a writer - have full control over, is always the best way to go.

[Vyliss]

Wow, that kind of reminds me of those translation tools where it automatically translates one language into another but I geuss this is worse lol. Well this is actually not too bad just for Backlinks, it's unique content and google bots shouldn't notice.

[Charles E. White]

Good post Mike! I do want to say one thing....you probably didn't find the worse writing of all time, you should have seen my first ebook. LOL

I had sold online for a few years on a BBS and then came on here for about a month and thought I knew about everything to a point. Needless to say, I knew nothing, so I wrote an ebook about it.

About the only person I knew back in those years that would tell me like it is was Paul Myers so I asked him what he thought about my new super duper ebook. Paul told me in a nice way but a truthful way too. Needless to say, I didn't publish the book but always respected Paul ever since and respected his opinion. He has helped me a lot since.

[mikemcmillan]

[QUOTE=Will Edwards;1175512]Hey Mike - you ain't never going to drink yourself to death taking a whole hour to drink a beer (lol).

I'm a guy who can write an article in 8 minutes, but it takes an hour to drink a beer. I need to reverse that statistic--I'm gunna start right now. Ha, ha--thanks for making me laugh Will

[Steven Wagenheim]

The above makes more sense than what I just read.

And I don't even know what I'm talking about.

Funny, I was just writing about how article marketing was in serious trouble.

This is one of the main reasons.

[SurviveUnemployment]

[quote=mikemcmillan;1176271]

Originally Posted by Will Edwards

Hey Mike - you ain't never going to drink yourself to death taking a whole hour to drink a beer (lol).

I'm a guy who can write an article in 8 minutes, but it takes an hour to drink a beer. I need to reverse that statistic--I'm gunna start right now. Ha, ha--thanks for making me laugh Will

Drink more beer and your article writing will slow down. You might even end up like Dylan Thomas or Allen Ginsburg, pondering a semicolon for hours.

[seobro]

They say "Plan 9 From Outer Space" is the worst movie ever made, but as for worst article. Well, some grunt is probably typing it now.

Hint, must have grammer errors and typos so bad that you can barely understand it. ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!

[George Katsoudas]

That's Shakespeare-quality content...

[Paul Hancox]

Spinning is OK if the end product makes good sense. I know some people spin their articles just to get backlinks, but when you put CR*P out like that you just want to hope your customers never read that stuff

[bgmacaw]

I think you should automate your articles, especially on web properties you own, to get links. What I'm getting at is you might want to provide that which provides you with more links. This is something I'll treasure and I highly recommend it. People do this simply because everyone else does it. You remember that, right but never too late to learn. I'm going to share some of my personal insights into what I've learned about this. It's called setting priorities. Forget about the past and start thinking about how spun articles can make a difference in your life. This process should be standardized by now. I'm fairly self-sufficient.

Granted most old stuff deserves to be criticized. Awhile back I saw a this like that. Now, let's look at each. That's the first thing. I know, I can be opinionated. That was my favorite part. Spun articles has been celebrated by many.

I don't want to say the same thing twice. Do I seem very ungenerous? This echoes the sentiment from my last article and it represented a phenomenal breakthrough. Perhaps I may be more than a little confused by it and this could be detrimental to it. This should grab your attention.

You will have to establish yourself as a it expert. How can you make sure that if you used thence to be lost in the shuffle? Avoid spun articles like the plague. This is a rant that is long overdue and this needs to be enforced. Just some food for thought because it provides people with satisfaction. It is a competitive industry but becomes like that just doesn't interest me.

Sorry but here it is: I am really off base on this one. I can't stress enough the importance of it. Spun article is not worth the risk but it performs at a phenomenal level.

I think people get too caught up on the issue. So because of that alone, my immediate answer would be no. And you know what the kicker is? Here's where can you find it. Let's look at the plus side of that, which is pretty obvious. It will. It may not be best to use of it because I want to look credible. It is well worth investing time into learning it.

OK. I'm sorry. Sorry, I can't make everyone happy. In my opinion, that means that there would be no point in spun article.

[locpic63]

Originally Posted by Steven Wagenheim

Translation "Do not ask the question if you do not want to hear the answer. The truth hurts."

Here's to your continuing success
Locpic63

[Sonja]

Originally Posted by CDarklock

Joke is to being on the you! Many author which to write similar such thing is not to using the real names! Much article out here is making to by same the author but must to have differing of names on him. You are will reading articles by same the author and not to knows it! Laughing to his bank all the ways.

Oh, crap, it's contagious.

ROFLMAO!!!!! You so got me with this one

[SMP]

Originally Posted by CDarklock

Joke is to being on the you! Many author which to write similar such thing is not to using the real names! Much article out here is making to by same the author but must to have differing of names on him. You are will reading articles by same the author and not to knows it! Laughing to his bank all the ways.

Oh, crap, it's contagious.

This is the best post I've read today

The joke's on me, though. I thought it was a serious post until I was half way through it.

Steve.

[DeePower]

I wonder if the semi colon; pondered back?

Dee

[Steven Fullman]

Yeah, yeah. Poor writing.

It's all about the click-through, though, innit?

Steve

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by Steven Fullman

It's all about the click-through, though, innit?

Or the links. They are two different goals in many cases.

[mikemcmillan]

Originally Posted by DeePower

I wonder if the semi colon; pondered back?

Dee

Dee, the short answer: Yes! After a few shots of Cuervo, the semicolon looked back into the eyes of Thomas. She respected him, but as she poked her finger into his lonely, emotionless existence she realized it smelled of nothing. She laughed and she cried. She finally succumbed to his request for help.

The synergy obvious. The beauty of the finished product glared fluorescent against a backdrop of the hopeless angst of a writer set to destroy himself.

The union of the willingness of the semicolon to participate with the request of the author for help--well, what do you think of the solution?

"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
--Dylan Thomas

[CDarklock]

Originally Posted by DeePower

I wonder if the semi colon; pondered back?

If so, it did a half-arsed job of it.

<GDR>

[rhondaklewis]

Originally Posted by CDarklock

If so, it did a half-arsed job of it.

<GDR>

Stop it you're killing me!

[Mr.Tambourine]

whoa ! Thats a BIG article !

[Thomas W]

I'm probably the worst article writer. i might even be the worst forum poster

[Talinn]

I do not understand having you not liking that article having the status of likely.

[Buildingfutures]

It seems like that person has the grammatical abilities of a typical high-school kid, seemingly mixing up ideas in the sentence. It really gets on my nerves when I have to re-read something simply because the person wrote in a confusing way.

[BiancaRaven]

I recently found a spun article that was originally one I'd written and submitted to a directory. The spun article made it sound like I'd been taught to speak English by Yoda. It was atrocious, but somebody obviously liked it enough to spin it for their own use.

[Steven Wagenheim]

Sorry Mike, but I just found one that's worse.

Acne big don't just out one look and cut the best tree for walking parks
play if what role you health runs big place consistent works does that
mind see dog joke helps chest get off...

I won't print the rest of it because I don't want to give anybody a stroke.

[hamzagee]

I have gain a lot by reading your thread. I hope it will help me to write the best articles in....

[mikemcmillan]

Steve, are you sure that's not from page one of Finnegans Wake? Kidding

And Steve, I've read quite a few of your EZAs. It is obvious that you either write them all yourself (or hire someone with a functioning cerebral cortex); they are nicely done.

Your article, Article Writing Tips - The Death of Article Marketing?, ends with, "Clean up this mess or there won't be anything left to clean up." Well done bud!

[mikemcmillan]

Originally Posted by CDarklock

Joke is to being on the you! Many author which to write similar such thing...
Oh, crap, it's contagious.

CD, I remember the movie Memento, when the main character (who had no short term memory) was running down the alley saying to himself, "Hey, why am I chasing that guy?" Two seconds later he realizes what's going on and says, "Oh sh*t, that guy's chasing ME!"

That's kind of how I felt when I read the first line of your post. I thought, OMG--here's a dumb arse posting to my thread whose dissyllibication is exactly what I'm talking about.

But after completely reading the thing I said to myself--Hey he's not the dumb arse--I AM, for not reading it completely. Low grade humor, but very high grade funny. Thanks! --Mike

[mikemcmillan]

Originally Posted by Kezz

Same here, between the improvised "post spinning" and the newest term added to my insult vocabulary; "Head cheese", I got two solid chuckles out of this thread.

Hey Kezz, glad you got a new word for your insult vocabulary. Thought you might want an image to go with your new phrase. Just don't use it to insult any Warriors--okay? We're all friends here!

head•cheese |hed, CH EZ|
meat from a pig's head (snout, ears, eyelids, etc.) that is cooked and pressed into a sandwich loaf



(Believe it or not, I use this image to promote one of my products!)

[WritingMadwoman]

All I can say is thank god I've had a couple cups of coffee before entering this thread, otherwise I'd have a headache right now. Some really funny responses though, you guys are good!

Wendy

[Steven Wagenheim]

Originally Posted by mikemcmillan

Steve, are you sure that's not from page one of Finnegans Wake? Kidding

And Steve, I've read quite a few of your EZAs. It is obvious that you either write them all yourself (or hire someone with a functioning cerebral cortex); they are nicely done.

Your article, Article Writing Tips - The Death of Article Marketing?, ends with, "Clean up this mess or there won't be anything left to clean up." Well done bud!

Thanks Mike...I just tell it like it is.