I wasn’t sure how to do it, but I think it’s worked. I can’t really find the old locations in search results, except for a search term that lead to the URL with no description. I did put in the title and subtitle as my search terms, so maybe that’s what they show. But I thought they then put in the meta description? I’m not sure if it’s working, or if it’s just working poorly.

*So my question from that last paragraph is: ***Should they acknowledge this sub-directory at all?*** * Has it not worked? I noticed I repeated the disallow part for that folder twice, so maybe that worked against me, or I mistyped something. I will hope my fixes of it will fix it.

I did notice that the other new domains seem to be showing up in my searches, now! But oddly, there’s a lot of crosses, like I intend to find one blog and find another one of mine, linking to that blog. I can’t find an example right now. I know this is not optimal, but perhaps it’s a step toward good.

** What’s your good word on that? **

I should check my Referrer Stats more closely, right now. But with all this information, my mind’s a bit bogged, and I’m not feeling well. I need to figure out exactly how to analyze, since I still have the Sitemeter codes up on the old sites (I can’t admit to lesser traffic, if people are still seeing this content. I don’t know, it’s an insecurity thing. Maybe it wouldn’t matter with the people moving to the new location. At least I have a way to check if they do that.) I’ve figured out ways to check in my stats, but like I said, my mind’s in a fog and weighed down.

So that has caused this comment to be long and probably confusing, and perhaps seemingly unnecessary. But it’s helping me (other than me getting too deep in thoughts). I also re-read it and tried to make it clear, and star my actual questions, hopefully I’ve helped YOUR confusion, readers. (If you care :-P.)

Anyway, back to more important things, I think. I’m looking more in to the robots.txt and now I know more, like I can disallow all search bots, and I don’t need to repeat “User-agent.”

Anyway, quite helpful. It’s all a big process of improvement!

I don’t mean to be asking for a lot of free help on something that you have no obligation to give support for. I’m just typing all this, because the article and the one you linked to caused a lot of thinking. Just that and the action (taking steps) and thinking I’ve done while writing this comment, even, has helped.

But if anyone does know more about these search engines and can easily have answers for me, thanks!!

/end stupid comment :-P

My new domains don’t have all the links built back yet, although they are doing well with traffic and ad clicks, they are doing poorly in search engines. Does this mean I should wait to remove the old blogs (all links on blogs point to new homes, and pages have clear labels, etc.) until the new sites are on track, or does this mean having the old content up is hurting with SEO?

While free articles can be posted on many sites including blog, they may be useful for ezine publishers (hence the name ezine articles). This method is still effective to build your brand and drive traffic.

Bloggers can quote or post in full and add their own spin. Republishing for the sake of quantity won’t get you far. There are ways to leverage other people’s content but still a bit of work will boost your credibility too.

Free articles usually include a link back in the resource box. Make sure if you use the article, the site you are linking to is legitimate, or you may jeopardize not only your reputation, but also penalize by Google.

Good to know though.

I am writing 2 artcile per day, but I am not using the exact same content on my own sites (which I have been doing up until about 2 weeks ago). This way I get traffic from the lazy people (I am lazy too) and I am not getting delisted by google.

Good topic.

I have not used any free articles, and don’t intend to. I have a small but loyal readership, and I think I owe it to them to write the articles myself.

Just my POV
Joe

While you may not want to use duplicate content or unoriginal content, if you are an expert in any field, I think you should be encouraged to submit your articles to sites such as ezines.

I also recently checked out my backlinks on Google and was happy to find out that links in the footer of every article were indexed by Googlebot and my SE rankings for certain high-traffic keywords increased.

Mainly I want my site to be my site.

At the very least, you can create permanent links on your blog to showcase some of your content over the long term. When your content is entered through some sort of CMS, stored in a database, and delivered through scripting, there’s no need to think in terms of “articles” or even “pages” anymore. All such things are virtual, anyway: a category archive is as good as a tag archive is as good as a chronological archive is as good as a page.

One thing I’ve seen Tom Peters do at his blog is collect a bunch of posts into a downloadable digest. I can see how that might be a good and useful idea for someone who wants to “catch up” but isn’t online all the time, like during a flight or a commute.

Also – it should be noted, that I don’t always publish every free article that comes out. Currently, there are 5 people writing EXCELLENT articles, but I don’t support their site at all and refuse to use their articles to link back to their site. So, I do draw the line somewhat.

If you are going to put that much effort into it, why not write an original article?

I think it depends on what the purpose of the blog is. I also agree with Darren that a lot of the articles are bland and general. I really have to dig through the free article sources to find articles of value…in that sense I feel I am doing something valuable by distilling through the crap to find the valuable articles….in the past I have also summarized articles with links to the main free article (that seems to have done well).

Vic