Did someone steal my stuff?

Alright, here's a little breakdown:

#1: You submit your article to article directories.

#2: Article directories allow others to FREELY re-publish your articles, as long as they keep everything, INCLUDING YOUR SIGNATURE WITH THE
ACTIVE LINKS TO YOUR WEBSITE, in tact. Thus giving all of the credit to you, this is LEGAL, and is allowed. Much like how we are allowed to quote books or other people, so long as we provide proper citations.

#3: The reason why article directories do this, and why people might want it, is because people need content. This is one way of getting content, but the only catch is that they have to publish all of your signature too. But for some people that doesn't matter, as it's still content and if your content is relevant to what they need, they will use it on their website.

#4: What else do they do with that article? Well they can use it to drive back links to their ORIGINAL website. They can also drive the back-links to the article itself, and get it ranked, which therefore ranks their website in the process. Why would they do that? Well they are likely doing this for a few keywords, and it saves them a lot of time to find articles that way, and publish them, rather than having to sit and write them. It's a very fast method.

They may have back linked this a long time ago as well, and may have posted it to their website a long time ago, which also helps it to rank above yours, depending on how long they have been actively promoting their website with your article.


#5: It's not a bad thing. You should want people to publish your articles, because that is in effect back linking for you, right? So that's not a bad thing, this person, however has just done a lot more with your article(s), than what other publishers do, because they obviously saw some potential with the keywords.


#6: They can see the keywords you used in your article. But how did they know your keyword had potential? Well any time you submit an article to an article directory, it asks you to input some keywords, right? So you input the keywords you used. BUT, any time someone publishes your article (and even without publishing it), they can see what keywords you entered in, and in effect can find out what your article is optimized for, as long as you used the same keywords in your article that you used as your meta tags.


#7: You should be flattered. People are using your work. You have to keep in mind that these article directories depend on others to use them in this manner. It's not your website, that you are submitting these articles to. It's someone else's..and they willingly allow companies and businesses to come in and use any and ALL of the content (articles) submitted to their directory, because that is a business relation and keeps things going.


But someone chose to use your article, or articles, and if this article was from EZA, you can see how many times it has been published in your interface, as for ArticlesBase, I'm not sure where you can find those statistics, but there's nothing wrong with it. Someone is picking your content, and that's a good thing, means you are doing it right, and that you have something others can use or want to use.


Also, while they are publishing your article, it links back to your site yet again, from another website, right? So that is actually good for you, and for them they are getting some content, so that is good for them, and for the article directory, they are still getting more traffic and are maintaining the other set of customers (the publishers). So it should keep everyone happy that way.


But now that you know this, it doesn't mean you can't get ranked over your own article. You just need to see how many back links that person has, what keywords they are ranking for specifically, and a few other things, and need to do the same thing they did, only on a grander scale. Once you do that, your article will be on top of theirs, and either way, your article is on top anyways, because YOUR LINKS are still active there.


So you are still getting the sales, of course that is as long as they don't have tons of other things on their website as well, such as adsense, or other ads, or other reviews of products, but either way they are driving free traffic your way. So be happy.