Catch Up

It's been too long again since I posted here. Too much to do and too little time. The good news is that BB Articles has now got an Alexa ranking of less than 200,000. That means more traffic and hopefully more article reads. I aim now to get the Alexa ranking below 100,000 within 12 months. It will be hard work but from the beginning I said that BB Articles was going to be one of the best article directories and I like to keep my word.

A couple of months back I removed the sign up form because agents of a company who paid their agents to submit plagiarised articles were spamming BB Articles and other directories with so many cheat articles that it was costing me 2-3 hours a day to check and delete articles and the many new accounts that they opened up every day. I work in a full time job besides run an internet business so some days all that I had the time to do after work was deal with these submissions and my business was suffering.

Last week I was able to put the sign up form back because of a nifty add on created by Bob of www.bjc-computer-services.com The script allows me to check all of the pending articles and delete the offending ones that ring alarm bells with one magical click - the whole process only takes seconds. When you think that it's deleting something like 100 articles a day you can imagine how much time and stress that the script is saving me. I just worry that some of the genuine articles might get caught up in it.

In my last update I talked about my newest site www.uksmartguide.com I've developed that quite a lot and the traffic has grown substantially in a short time. That's thanks to the article marketing that I've been doing and also to the content that I've added regularly. Apart from my own additions a lot of that content has come from BB Articles and my travel article directory Articles Abroad. It's great having so much readily available content that I can use to build a site quickly, but I would still like more content about every area of the UK and especially reviews from those who have actually visited or live in any part of the UK.

Articles Abroad has been doing well too. I love that site - I get to read about lots of different places every day, trouble is I want to visit them all. I designed a new cheerful header last month, professional designers will probably think it's naff but what the heck I like it.

One thing that I have noticed especially about articles submitted in the travel niche is that some of the authors mess up by using bad titles for their articles. What I mean is titles like 'car hire in Istanbul' or 'holiday rentals in Spain'. You click to view the articles expecting an article about car hire or holiday rentals and find a description of a place with no mention of car hire or holiday rentals until you hit the author resource box. Basically the titles are aimed at the resource box and misleading to readers. If I was searching for information about car hire or holiday rentals and hit on one of these misleading articles I would click away annoyed and certainly not click on any links in the resource box.

Thats enough for today I think.