Problems With Pen Names



Should you submit your articles to the different article directories available, you will more than likely find that these allow you to have a username, which you use to login, and at least one pen name, which are displayed as the articles author. Now, I've noticed a few problems here.

The first problem is usually caused when you already have an account at an article site, then join an article distribution service such as iSnare. The submission service will generate you a new account, and sometimes, if the pen name you use with the submission service is identical to an existing one at the site, you may end up with a blank as the distribution services pen name, as the duplicate is rejected. This means that the ability of search engines to spider your articles is significantly reduced, as there are no links to "Author Details or similar pages. Some directories will decline your article should this happen.

Next, putting your site URL as your pen name is usually not appreciated either, so just don't do it. In addition, many directories will reject articles written by something other than First Name Last Name, so, although rules do vary from site to site, it's unlikely that any will object to a pen name of, e.g., "John Smith", whilst will reject or delete articles by "mysitename.com" or "The Internet Marketer. Just remain with a standard name, even if it's not your real one, and you will avoid any problems like this.

Poor Use of Article Rewriters

You may not have heard of services such as these, or you may use something along these lines without knowing what it is. There are a number of variants around, but what they all have in common is that they are designed to take an article, and create a number of different versions of it. The differences may be only slight, but the concept is to make a variety of "different" articles to avoid duplicate content filters.

Now, there is nothing wrong with doing this, but there are wrong ways of doing it. If the spinner replaces words or phrases with variations, for example, "In the beginning" could also be phrased as "To start with", after doing this for an article and producing a number of variants, read each one through to make sure they still make sense. It's quite easy to produce gibberish if you don't, and most decent article directories don't like to publish gibberish. If an article needs tweaking, do so manually. Far better to make sure you spend a bit of time now on the article, then having to fix it after rejection.

Next, if you generate a batch of 20 different articles, submit each article to a different site. Therefore, 20 articles to 20 sites. Or submit them to batches of sites, one article to 10 sites, the next to another 10 and so on. Do not submit all 20 versions to the same directory. That will probably just get them rejected, and you may lose your account for annoying the directory owner.

Submission conditions, and what an article site or directory will accept or reject do change, sometimes fairly substantially, from directory to directory, but if you are cautious, you'll get much fewer articles rejected.