Yowsers - The Backlash & Spam Accusations

I guess with all ideas - there are some who will hate it and some who will love it. I've received a LOT of email about the promo I sent out about the 25 free articles you can get from David Hooper.

On of the emails I received was from from Mitchell Allen saying he thought this was a horrid idea and you can read his opinions on his blog. I've also received several similar comments from others. Frankly, I was really surprised and here was my response to Mitch:

"I really appreciate your input, but I'm not completely sure I get your point. People have been using reprint articles for years (even big sites like MSN, Web Pro News & others do it all the time!). I've been doing it too and get great search engine traffic as you can optimize reprint articles for any phrase that you want. That's why sites like ezinearticles.com and the like exist - to circulate good content.

But realize, even though you can still rank well on search engines with reprints - search engines are not the end-all, be-all to your marketing. You have website visitors that find you through other channels. You have subscribers that never search on a search engine to read your content. There is so much space out there in virtual-land that most searchers on a certain topic will never see the same article twice.

Certainly, some will use it to spam, but I can spam with original content too. This article service was not created as a spam tool and the majority of people who use it, just want to get their content out there and to reach an audience of people who are hungry for the information. Those who are going to truly spam aren't going to take a bunch of text files and a spreadsheet and spam the net. True spammers are more sophisticated and have all the automated tools to publish their content to the web. They really don't need a service like this to meet their objectives. "

Personally, I have no control over spammers. One could argue that Google has the ultimate spam tool in Blogger - have you seen some of the horrendous blogs? But of course, we can't argue that successfully because that's not the way the tool was intended. Spammers will spam and they'll use whatever tools they can to do so...even ones that aren't intended to spam. Article Multiplier is offered as a mere bonus to the articles, but I still intend to use it. I have websites on similar topics that reach completely different audiences, so I will mix up the articles a bit to meet my objectives. If that's spam...so be it.

I use reprint articles (and I don't consider myself to be a spammer) to provide my visitors with the information they are looking for. It's erroneous to think that if I have a website about golf all my visitors will eventually find out about your golf website and they'll be subject to reading the same articles twice. Come on! The Internet is a massive place and you can search for days and keep learning new things.

And let's look at other people who publish or sell the same content. Who else is annoyed at Amazon for carrying the same content (via books you buy) as Barnes & Noble? How dare they?! And what about Napster and iTunes who have the nerve to provide the same songs to their users? Or what about the two city newspapers that publish the same stories? Or restauarants who serve the same spaghetti dish?

I know I'm being a bit silly now, but frankly, I am puzzled by all the fuss - and I'm not just talking about Mitch's blog entry. I've received quite a bit of commentary like this - Mitchell is just an unlikely scapegoat here. ;-) Certainly, the private label articles aren't for everybody...but heck, reprinting articles is nothing new and is a great way to circulate information.