Listed below are some more faults I’ve come across with received articles that can get them rejected. Problems With Pen Names Should you promote articles you’ve written on the various article sites available, you will more than likely find that these allow you to have a username, which is required to login, and at least one pen names, which are displayed as the name of the author of the article. Now, I’ve seen several faults here. The first fault is usually caused when you already have an account at an article directory, then join an article distribution service such as Article Marketer. The distribution service will generate you a new account, and sometimes, if the pen name you use with the submission service is the same as an existing one at the directory, you may end up with a blank as the distribution services pen name, as the identical one is rejected. This means that the ability of search engines to spider your articles is greatly decreased, as there are no links to “About the Author” or similar pages. Some sites will decline your article should this happen. Next, using your website address as your pen name is frequently not appreciated either, so just don’t do it. In fact, many directories will decline articles written by something other than a proper First and Surname person, so, although terms do alter from site to site, it’s doubtful that any will decline to a pen name of, e.g., “John Smith”, whilst will decline or delete articles by “mysitename.com” or “The SEO Guru”. Just remain with a standard name, even if it’s not your actual one, and you will avoid any problems such as this. Poor Use of Article Spinners You may not have come across services such as these, or you may use something along these lines without knowing what it is. There are several different versions around, but what they all have in common is that they are designed to take one article, and make a number of different variations of it. The differences may be only minor, but the concept is to make a variety of “unique” 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 bunch of 20 variant articles, submit each article to a different site. So, 20 articles to 20 sites. Or submit them to groups of directories, one article to 10 directories, the next to a further 10 and so on. Do not submit all 20 variants to one directory. That will probably just get them rejected, and you may get your account deleted for annoying the directory owner. Submission terms, and what an article site or directory will accept or decline do change, sometimes quite substantially, from site to site, but if you err on the side of caution, you’ll get much fewer articles rejected. Adrian Kennelly is the webmaster of DirectoryGold Web Directory and Article Directory. Visit the Article Directory for other articles on Article Writing.

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