Shorten Ezine Articles URLs?

Hi Nikki,

I'll cherry pick just one of your questions
Niche forums are not too happy with article URLs since there are a lot of spam programs out there that create profiles and do enter these article URLs instead of the main site to avoid being reported as a spammer.

Do avoid these you do need a lot of credibility in the forum, than you could contact the mods and ask for an exception.

Why? Wouldn't you rather build those backlinks to the copy of the article originally posted and indexed on your own site prior to EZA submission, so that you're building up your site rather than someone else's, and so that you don't lose a proportion of the traffic to EZA's AdSense but have all those people reading the article on your site instead of on EZA's?

You can buy a $1 .info domain-name, or use a free .co.cc or .tk domain-name as a redirecting-device, if you really want to, and that'll do the trick. You'll need one for each article, though.

The important thing to avoid is a "url shortening service" like bit.ly, tinyurl and all those others, because it's a big mistake to allow your business to be dependent on the continued availability, reliability, existence and terms of service of an unnecessary third-party service (look at all the Warriors who had a major panic during last year when Tinyurl suddenly went into bankruptcy and all their links disappeared overnight, and learn from their experience. To someone building their own business, it makes absolutely no sense at all to put yourself in this position, when there are far more reliable, sensible alternatives available which will leave you in control, instead of someone else, if anything goes wrong, And don't let anyone tell you that "bit.ly isn't going anywhere" because that was exactly what they were all saying about tinyurl the day before that one suddenly disappeared!).

If places you want to drop your link won't accept a direct link to an EZA article, it may help to get round their rules and get your link posted. In the long run, it won't help your business and your website as much as linking there instead, though.

There can be a short-term gain from backlinking to article directories, but in the long run it cumulatively damages your site and your business (when compared with the alternative of making all those links to your own site instead), because all it's really doing in ensuring that article directories will always outrank your own site for your own keywords. What kind of way is that to try to build a business?

Sorry, I don't know. It wouldn't occur to me to try to do what you're trying to do. I'm an article marketer: I use article directories as a way of getting traffic from them to my own site, not as a way of generating backlinks to send traffic to them. :confused: