EZA Expert Author's Question

Originally Posted by Alexa Smith

A few people send paid-for/automated traffic to an EZA article, just to get it into the "most viewed articles" lists, because people notice those and it can help to get additional readers who are already on the site (some of them are competitors and webmasters, but some are probably potential customers, too). It's contrary to EZA's terms of service, and several Warriors have had their accounts permanently closed down for doing this.



Absolutely right.

This is really fundamental.

There are some people who advise others to send traffic (from backlinking and so on, all the usual forms of SEO), instead of to their own sites, to the copy of their article on EZA! They say it works for them. It's probably because they've chosen keywords so competitive that they can't rank their own site for them, and they need EZA's page-rank to be able to get traffic at all. :rolleyes:

So what they're doing is promoting EZA's property instead of their own, and sending their traffic there to feed on all EZA's AdSense. EZA must love them (and doing that certainly isn't against the TOS, of course - it's just paid-for traffic and automated clicks that are prohibited).

There is, genuinely, a short-term gain in doing that. And a great big long-term cost, of course, because the one thing you can be sure of, if you do this, is that article directories will always outrank you for your own keywords.

However, it appeals to people who don't want to build "authority sites" and prefer to build other people's properties up for them. It also appeals to people who are doing direct-linking and don't have a site, of course, and they (in a sense) have a more reasonable argument for doing it, if you like that kind of thing. It depends whether you want quick hit-and-run sales and to keep repeating that all the time, or to build up a real business. Good luck to them all, I say - in the long run, it's less real competition for me.

Much more detailed information, explaining what a mistake this generally is, is in this fine thread: it's long, but very worthwhile reading all the way through - not only for free lessons in article marketing from some real experts, but also to see some of the traps and pitfalls that others fall into, and the short-sighted views they take without quite being aware that the people "advising" them don't always have the finest and most perceptive appreciation of the situation.