Extra Ways to Get Your Article Declined

Here are some other problems I've seen with received articles that can get them declined.

Problems With Pen Names

Should you submit your articles on the various article directories available, you will usually find that these allow you to have a username, which you use to login, and at least one pen names, which are displayed as the articles author. Now, I've noticed a few problems with these.

The first fault usually happens when you have an existing account at an article site, then join an article distribution service such as iSnare. The distribution service will generate you a new account, and in some cases, if the pen name you use with the submission service is the same as an existing one at the site, you could end up with a blank as the submission services pen name, as the duplicate is declined. 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 don't do it. In addition, quite a number of sites 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 unlikely that any will object to a pen name of, for example, "John Smith", whilst will decline or remove articles by "mysite.com" or "The SEO Guru". Just stick with a standard name, even if it's not your real name, and you will avoid any problems like this.

Poor Use of Article Rewriters

You may not have come across services like these, or you may use something along these lines without realizing it. There are several different versions around, but what they all have in common is that they are designed to take an article, and make a number of different variations of it. The variations may be only slight, but the concept is to make a number of "different" articles to avoid duplicate content penalties.

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.

The next problem is if you generate a batch of 20 different articles, submit each article to a different directory. So, 20 articles to 20 directories. Or you could submit them to batches of directories, one article to 10 directories, the next to a further 10 etc. Don't submit all 20 variants to one directory. That will probably just get them rejected, and you may lose your account for irritating the directory owner.

Submission conditions, and what an article directory or site will accept or reject do vary, sometimes fairly substantially, from directory to directory, but if you err on the side of caution, you'll get much fewer articles declined.
Adrian Kennelly runs DirectoryGold Web Directory and Article Directory. See it for more articles on Writing Articles.