2010-02-21

EzineArticles - the verdict

The verdict is "NOT GUILTY!" :-)

Here is what I discovered during my little research:
  • EzineArticles has a well-designed and carefully developed interface for submitting articles. Except for minor bugs, everything works.
  • Submitted articles go through several stages of approval, starting from an automatic validation to the human-operated analysis of the content. (Disclaimer: my account was new. I do not know if the same level of validation is applied to the established authors)
  • My attempts to submit a "just-for-links" article failed. My article was rejected 5 times, for various reasons, including the last one, which pointed out that the content was "not unique and not giving any new specific information to the readers". There was a policy about the links, too, so I could not "stuff" my text with the link spam.
  • When I finally made a "real thing" (proud of myself :-), the article has been accepted. All the links in the article body had the "nofollow" tag (that means "ignored by Google"). Only the link in Author Profile (the article footer) did not have "nofollow".
  • After one week, the content of my article could be found only on the EzineArticles site. Therefore I assume that there is no automatic distribution of the content to some "satellite" websites.
In my opinion, EzineArticles cannot be used as a place to get "easy links".

2010-02-02

Postfix error -- connect to transport private/smtp: Connection refused

Problem:

Cannot send out any email, except to local users

Environment:

UNIX (Linux, FreeBSD, etc)
Postfix

Symptoms:

/var/log/maillog has these messages:
warning: connect to transport private/smtp: Connection refused

Reason:

"unix" smtp is disabled in Postfix configuration

Fix:

Uncomment this line in master.cf
smtp unix - - n - - smtp
(there are two more lines about smtp - they deal with external connections. Need them only if you want to accept mail from outside, not to send mail)

Additional thing to check:

mailer.conf should look like this:

$ cat /etc/mail/mailer.conf
#
# Execute the Postfix sendmail program, named /usr/local/sbin/sendmail
#
sendmail        /usr/local/sbin/sendmail
send-mail       /usr/local/sbin/sendmail
mailq   /usr/local/sbin/sendmail
newaliases      /usr/local/sbin/sendmail

2010-02-01

From EzineArticles to The Web

Here is an article submitted to EzineArticles.com 2 days ago:

Creating Your First Canvas Art Painting

http://ezinearticles.com/?Creating-Your-First-Canvas-Art-Painting&id=3662867

It's a typical "made-for-backlink" article. It links to http://www.artistry-pictures.co.uk/ for the "canvas art" phrase. Here is one more link for you, Daniel: Canvas Art

As of today, Google does not tell us there is a backlink to Artistry Pictures from Ezine Articles. Not enough time. Will see later.

However, there are several sites already having a copy of either the abstract of the whole article!
None of them have any attribution to Ezine Articles... Thieves? I do not know. Did not read the Terms of using EzineArticles' texts yet.

  1. Creating Your First Canvas Art Painting

    2 days ago - Creating your first canvas painting can be a daunting task. There are so many things to consider; which canvas to use, whether to use oil or acrylic paints ...
    ezinearticles.com/?Creating-Your-First-Canvas-Art-Painting...
  2. Everyone's Jumptags for Creating Your First Canvas Art Painting ...

    7 hours ago - Creating your first canvas painting can be a daunting task. There are so many things to consider; which canvas to use, whether to use oil or acrylic paints ...
    www.jumptags.com/item/4247E7F66ACA44138F97FF553974F330/ 
  3. Creating Your First Canvas Art Painting « Bulk News – bulk.net

    1 day ago - Creating your first canvas painting can be a daunting task. There are so many things to consider; which canvas to use, whether to use oil or acrylic paints ...
    www.bulk.net/creating-your-first-canvas-art-painting/ 
  4. Creating Your First Canvas Art Painting

    2 days ago - Creating your first canvas painting can be a daunting task. There are so many things to consider; which canvas to use, whether to use oil or acrylic paints ...
    dtcwebmedia.com/.../creating-your-first-canvas-art-painting-28232/
  5. Become a Model

    3 days ago - Creating your first canvas painting can be a daunting task. There are so many things to consider; which canvas to use, whether to use oil or acrylic paints ...
    www.becomeamodel.us/

More about EzineArticles

Testing EzineArticles.com

After the initial failure with one of the "Article Friendly", I went to http://ezinearticles.com

Here are my initial observations:
  • The user interface looks very contemporary and professional
  • Registration went smoothly
  • Submitting the first article was not particularly easy, because there were many rules and restrictions. However, the "learning curve" was not too steep, and I managed to submit it. Now waiting for the approval.
  • I did not have time to read everything, but my first impression about EzineArticles is very positive. It does NOT look like a born-to-spam website.
I am waiting now for the approval (or disapproval?) of my test article, and then will continue checking EzineArticles.