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The Death of Content Farms like Ezine Articles and Factoidz: Navneet Panda Algorithm Change by Google


Note: This is the “Beard the lion in his own den” piece I posted on Factoidz on 7/11/11. It lasted for about two days before it was taken down. Mike must have been busy spending all the money everyone else is earning for him, and not paying attention. The links to it have been redirected to the Factoidz Home page, and, sniffle, I have been demoted from, sniffle,  “Staff Writer” to “Factoidz Writer”. Enjoy...Then let’s sink his battle ship!




EzineArticles got it's start the Corporate-American way: Other people’s money, well, in this case, other people’s intellectual property. In 1999 Chris Knight founded EzineArticles.com, a useless content farm and the ultimate made for AdSense site, by purchasing several thousand articles from ArticleCity.com. My source could not confirm how much Knight paid for this body of content, but many of us who have written or spun articles to "get our start" in writing online, are guilty of accepting as little as $3.00 for seven hundred words, er, ghostwritten...Duh, we got our start, yeah, and some practice...Knight got millions from his shrewdness. Our own stupidity? Yup. Anyone who has ever ghostwritten an article for $3.00, run a check...Watch how many show up at EzineArticles and other content farms as well as made for Adsense sites.

Knight took this content and posted it under a bunch of made-up user names. They posted AdSense all around and bada-bing bada-boom...Return on investment! Now he needed to get more content for this ultimate MFA site, that is; "made for AdSense" as Steve Weber coined the phrase. Knight knew that he couldn't bring himself to continue paying such a ridiculously low amount of money for the handcrafted intellectual property of others. He needed to figure out a way to get this stuff for free. The "give and take" concept was born! Writers give Knight their intellectual property, and he takes the first-fruits of their efforts, i.e; the first and last dibs on AdSense click-throughs.

The writer takes a little box at the bottom of their article to post a link to their own site. The writer can not so much as mention his first name in the "give" box -the body of content that is his own article. There are endless debatable submission rules regarding keyword density and placement, the sole intention being to game Google search-bots, that it makes a writer ask "am I writing an article or doing a fricken' word puzzle?" Oh, and be careful with those naughty words -the EZA editors banned my  article, ‘Vasectomies and Christmas Trees: When Balls are just for Decoration’ -labeling it "obscene" because I used the word "balls" -referring to testicles...Gasp! Ironically, the VP of EzineArticles, Chris Knutson is known to use plenty of profanity during his frequent power-tripping tantrums thrown on the underpaid, overworked employees of EZA that aren't Knutson-Yurchin's (as some employees secretly call him) personal friends and family. Can you say "hypocrite?" How 'bout "control freak?" Strawboss. Get a real identity.

Now if by chance a Web surfer, after finding you're article on EZA, reads it, then clicks the link to your own MFA site that you must build, and of course stuff with more spun redundant crap, and then clicks on an AdSense ad you post there...you get paid. Three clicks is a long way to travel down the Information Super Highway and the revenue as compared to Chris Knight’s first fruits are like the wormy apples you pick up off the ground.  It's no fun to wade through piles of shitty, empty content so that you are forced to click an ad in a desperate attempt to get some specific information. Now Google has figured out a way to shake out the higher quality content.  Google is more concerned with the quality of the user's experience than the quantity of click-throughs. AdWords purchasers sure don’t mind less clicks divided by more conversions.

The Panda Farmer Change

As Matt Cutts, of Google once put it:

“One piece of advice I give to SEO masters is, don’t chase after Google’s algorithm, chase after your best interpretation of what users want, because that’s what Google’s chasing after.”

Exactly what I was saying in this piece:

The Best Approach to SEO

As I predicted in an article I posted on another content farm, Factoidz.com, called “The Future of SEO and how it affect content producers”  ...the SEO game has changed. Navneet Panda, an engineer for Google, wrote the code that does exactly what I said would be done, based on “human” opinion models, to make these Google bots better able to sniff out original, useful, quality content, and bury the crap.

I was one of the biggest shills for Factoidz, until Martin Rojas took over. I was proud of what we original writers were accomplishing in terms of quality. I liked the sleek look of the site. I enjoyed just writing...they chose photos and posted everything while keeping good track of traffic and other analytical data. At first the deal was a 50/50 split of Adsense revenue. Fair enough. So, I promoted Factoidz, becoming an unwitting shill. Turns out, Mike Quoc is a con artist, much like Chris Knight. Factoidz is a Ponzi scheme. (check out that link, it explains it all -who wrote that? Please come forward in comments.) After Ezine Articles cornered the market on getting absolutely free content. Associated Content figured out how to get tons of content for average $1.00 per article. Once they amassed it all, they sold the entire company to Yahoo for $90 million. Divide $90 million by the number of articles posted on AC at that time ~that should give you an idea what they really should have paid for those articles. Mike Q. at Factoidz applied the “Ponzi scheme” approach to get all of his content at AC prices, without any upfront payout.

The worse part about the way Mike did it, is that he screwed over many loyal people, like myself, who contributed ideas as well as content to the site, helping him build it up from nothing. The whole “buzz it up” feature on factoidz was my idea. He had awesome writers that were producing really good stuff, in a way that Wikipedia can’t. So he fired them. He was trying to be a “for profit” Wikipedia. Step away from Wikipedia Mr. Quoc. They are the fifth most popular Web site because they write unbiased facts. They don’t pander to advertisers. I have donated. I was hired directly by Mike Quoc to write reviews for different dating sites and other products like “Baby Can Read” when he first started looking to degrade Factoidz into a content farm. Then he shot down an article I wrote about an event in the life of Christ, because it wasn’t “factual.” Censor me and poke fun at my faith all in one email Mike, you douche...Oh yeah, and stiff me for the money you owe me for the non-factual articles you hired me to write -just to put the icing on the cake.

Chris Knight kept an in-house team. Mike Quoc, with my free help, schooled Knight on user content generated MFA sites, taking it to a level that Knight never could. Quoc’s users were not only generating all the content, they were also promoting it and the site. On top of that, they were building the site. In a little over two years, Factoidz accumulated over 1000 backlinks. Now he is flat out paying people to create them, $5 to $20 each...talk about beating a dead horse. Where Quoc turned against his own volunteers, Chris Knight back-stabbed his own in-house team. His original programmer, a source for this article, was fired soon after developing all the alchemy that took other people’s free, intellectual property, and turned it into gold for Knight’s pockets.

Good thing I have plenty more ideas! Not to mention I saw a lot of this coming, so I kept a few cards up my sleeve. Here is my advice for everyone who is still onboard these sinking ships known as Content Farms:

Get your own domain on Wordpress or Google Sites or something. I loved the layout at Factoidz when it first came out a couple years ago. I liked that they did all the publishing stuff, attaching pictures...that I guess they were stealing around the Internet....But now, it’s easy to have a site of your own, and do these things yourself. Or, pairs, or groups of content producers could team up with promoters and agents and techies and build something good together and share the spoils fairly. Google docs, and cloud computing makes it easy. With Kindle and Amazon, ebooks are in demand. Writers of this day and age can completely cut out the publisher as a middleman. Imagine? No use for Quoc or Knight.

Just write good content. Make a name for yourself. News is best, even if it’s told from a historical and personal perspective. -Remember, we are not journalists, we are bloggers, we can be part of the story and biased. Keep it kinda local, that’s if you want to make your revenue over the long haul through advertising. If you like cash on the barrel head, then pursue gigs working for Web sites. Stick to your expertise, and charge .03 to.06 per word, an average package deal for content running about $2,000.00 for one site. Ideally, I think a writer should dabble in each, and of course have at least one novel going, right?

I’ve recently built a private site, called Bangari Content Studios, where I’ve been landing a lot of this type of work, and a small group of writers are churning it out, open source style.  I could use help, especially from promoters and techies, and I’m paying these .03-.06/word rates for writing. I’m even negotiating to have by lines included with most content, eliminating “ghost writing” for the most part and getting writers the credit and exposure they deserve.

And then there are affiliate deals that content producers can make with Site owners...But that’s a card I’m keeping up my sleeve until I see how all this works out. I predict that the Internet, especially since the advance of social networking, and in light of this Panda change in Google algorithms, is going to offer excellent opportunities for poor hacks like us who cut our teeth, and got our practice, honed our skills even, and learned how easy it is to get screwed by sketchy schleps like Mike Quoc and Chris Knight and his gang.


Internet writers are going to become correspondents in small social circles. Unlike print journalism, the ratios for correspondent to reader will be smaller. The Burlington Press has  circulation of about 50,000 newspapers per day. A Blogger can make a living on about 5000-10000 readers per day. 5000 face book friends (the limit) could get you those kinds of numbers, but remember, traffic comes from many sources. Think like a magazine editor. The quality of your content has to be stellar. Team up with others; photographers, video editors, transcribers, techies... Multimedia is important, and is going to become much more important. Make a name for yourself. Inject some of your personality into the content you create. Get a following. Be a good correspondent for them. Sell only things that you can stand behind, and have bought or used yourself and liked.


The Exodus

Moses said to the Pharaoh  “Let my people go!”

Free and independent, that’s the way to go. “But what about the empire I’ve established?” you ask. Think of it like I think of my first two marriages; good practice. If you have built an empire at Ezine like Jeff Herring has, awesome! If you became a featured writer at Factoidz, great! Look at the traffic your articles are getting. These content farms are probably making $5/1000 page views just in AdSense. With your own site, there are other ways to make revenue, more targeted revenue, like affiliate revenue. You can promote or sell products that you really like, and know something about.

Should we take our content with us?

Yes. I’m going out on a limb here, but I think that if we take our content down and repost it on our own sites, we’ll bury the content farms. I’ve already noticed that my new blogger site, Camels and Shepherds and Spys...Oh my!  is outranking the content farms for a Google search of my name, and I haven’t done any SEO work to make that happen. If Mike tries to stop you, talk to Ginger Baxter aka Sara Valor. She and many other contributors to Factoidz, like Clarsie Dotes, forced Mike Quoc to remove their content, leaving not a trace. He changed his TOS so many times from the original (that he stole from another content farm) here is what a pissed off Factoider found out:

I spoke to a lawyer who said that the Terms of Service are "unconscionable and therefore unenforceable"--so that's not going to protect him ultimately, either.  By the way, have you read them lately?  In Paragraph 7 he says we own our copyrights and content; then in Paragraphs 8 and 13 it says he has the right to use or modify (or, for example, make a MOVIE) out of them--and even that he has the right to take action for anybody else to publish them.  It cancels itself out.  So the issues with the TOS are much worse than merely copying it from somebody else; he is stealing our copyrights, and the word "stealing" is NOT an exaggeration since he continues to earn revenue (even if it's not much) from our work while we receive nothing, and we are powerless to control it.

This is it folks. You have no control over your own property. Say “Fuck you, Mike Q” and get your art out of the hands of anyone but yourself. Learn ~Wordpress or Blogger or Weebly, etc...Sign up to follow my new Blog and of course, I’ll follow yours. I’ll be publishing a lot more competitive intelligence here that will help you throughout the transition to complete independence. I’ll be looking for some answers too I’m sure. I envision a net of former content farm writers all linked to each other, commenting and supporting each other, learning from each other and sharing information and news, all from their own independent domains.

Let’s roll!

16 comments:

  1. Thanks for posting this. For awhile there, I thought I had done wrong by Mike. Turns out, he's just s d*&k.

    Hey, I also remember when you wrote that warning article about the future of SEO. And I remember being in the group of dummies whose collective knickers got in a twist over the truth-which-we-did-not-see. I'm sorry I gave you so much crap.

    I was just a dancing monkey, used as entertainment, for a bunch of bored housewives. I was a fool to dog-pile on you like I did. But, in the end, you held your ground, and you were closer to what was coming than most others.

    Thanks again. Great blog.

    ReplyDelete
  2. What is the link to Bangari Content Studios. I put that in browser, but it is difficult to find the actual site.

    ReplyDelete
  3. That is an invitation only site...Go to Bangari Content Gallery and sign up, once I have your email, I'll let you in the "Studio" site. We collaborate to produce content "wiki" style...And I have been getting/paying .03-.06 per word.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Linda also said (on Face Book)

    Linda Smith Kevin: I read your article. So, apparently we have to right to copy our articles and use them if we wish to do so. I did get smart and started keepint a copy of each one I wrote before I published it, since it is so hard to copy from the site. Who is this Martin Rojas? It seems like he is the new patsy for Mike Quoc, HIPPP HORRAY FACTOIDZ IS WONDERFUL. Actually, it seems like he is one of the few posting anything on the site. It is really starting to look like garbage articles now. Buzz up, is the same articles over and over and over again, yet your earnings stay at 0,0,0, and more 0s. Wow, somebody made it to be a Factoiz Staff Writer, who now earns less than they did as a drone writer. So, get promoted, have people like Rojas good for you, See how wonderful Factoidz is, while you earn less after the promotion. I also noticed that just recently, I had been using Tu haraffic Ad Bar for free advertising usiing Ezine articles and my factoidz. The site will not work anymore with those url's. Every factoidz article URL you place on their, just takes reader to a join up, sign up page. The idea of posting our own articles on our own blog instead of these Content Rip Off Sites, clears up my hesitation to do so. The next great idea you had in your article was to form a group who helps each other. If you are a Word Press fanatic that understands it, and writes how to do it, etc, etc, etc, what do I care. I would be glad to write a SEO article and add the link for Word Press Fanatic to my article, and post their link on my blog. They just got a backlink for free. They just got their site promoted without some site telling them they cannot promote self. Now, they do the same for me, if they like what I am doing, or some other person does the same as I did for this person, it can turn into snowflake to avalance of activity for our blogs and web sites simply because we support each other, may allow others to post an article on our blog pages, etc. Am I nuts or what?
    20 minutes ago

    ReplyDelete
  5. Interesting behind the scenes investigative information. You Rock!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Interesting info on ezine and "content farms" -- quite an eye opener. Going from print to online writing is quite a change, but not difficult at all. I wrote a dozen articles for ezine and the rules kept changing. Going to take your advice.
    GMT

    ReplyDelete
  7. I needed to read this. I started by writing for ezine for nothing, -quite mad as I think of it now and joined helium. made a few bucks and helium has also crashed almost. I joined factoidz and a few great reviews. just as I thought I was making great money, there came the rejections. one more and I will be banned they say. I dont what the reason is , its just an automatic mail. they dont even give a chance to repair. so now, after I read your post, I think its not worth wasting my time on such sites that dont give a thought to a writers effort and pain. I hope I can join your site and I do write for bright hub but the oppurtunities are few or nil now that I have completed five.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Hi everyone!

    Sorry for the delay in responding to your comments...there was a glitch! Here is a new post that addresses your much appreciated response to my death of content farms post

    http://judithgiustovskevinleland.blogspot.com/2011/09/project-exodus-salvage-your-content.html

    ReplyDelete
  9. You know how you prayed for the OK Killer? Well I'm praying for you too.. listen and be blessed by the words.. they were written, I bet, with you in mind.


    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atBg9zLI2bA&feature=youtu.be

    ReplyDelete
  10. C'mon Anonymous...Grow some balls, leave a name!

    ReplyDelete
  11. Great information, and the more I read it the more it makes sense. I am turning to believe that ALL of this ...is TRUE!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I believe this is true!

      I once asked Mike to remove one of my articles, just one out of hundreds I've written, and he refused and wrote some bullshit comment like, "Great review" or something.

      Delete
  12. Hey Stickman! You turned out some excellent work for Quoc. Thanks for the vote of confidence on this information I put out. So, what are you going to do with all that talent, and all that content now? Peace.

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I’m not a reporter or a journalist who is prevented from making myself part of the story. I’m a blogger, and these stories are a part of me. Therefore, expect me to be making more than a cameo appearance in them. I know I’m not the only one out here who has had a life. I welcome anyone with a good story to share a guest spot. I will help anyone with a good scoop to investigate. Bring it on! (I’ll share revenue) No slander, no gossip -just true, emotionally riveting, newsworthy drama.