Unsuccessful attempt to submit an article

I decided to post a test article. Not through an automatic submission service, but manually, directly on one of the "Article Friendly" sites. Registered myself. After verifying email address, received the confirmation. But - login did not work. Not immediately, and not after 24 hours.

Abandoned site? Let's wait a bit and see it that's a live thing or a zombie :-)

Do "Articles" really work?

I checked one specific article.

I clicked on one of the "Article Friendly"-powered sites, Echievements.com
There was an article titled "Crash Course In Forex Education - What You Need To Know To Get Started" by Nick Makaryk.

The article started with:

The foreign currency exchange, or Forex, is about trading money. Currency from every country is traded, sold and bought... (truncated)

Google search by that phrase returned "about 6400 results"! I assume, this article has been automatically submitted to every "article" website. Or it was a part of the "starter" database and therefore instantly appeared on all those sites right after the installation. This way or another, Google finds too many of them to have any importance, I think.

Now, the article (and some its clones) ended with

Nick Makaryk is an Internet Publisher, Copywriter, and Founder of Best Credit Cards . A Free consumer credit card comparison site helps consumers find the Best Credit Card while avoiding high interest rates, charges, and fees.

Searching by that footnote returned only 677 results in Google. Shouldn't Google return the same "about 6400"? Probably it should, unless the large portion of clones did not have the attribution to Mr. Makaryk....

Finally, the footnote had links to creditcardcredit.net
However, Google search by link:http://creditcardcredit.net/ returned only 2 results! (1,400 results for the same search in Yahoo, though).
The creditcardcredit.net website has Google PR 2

Should I say that "article" websites do not work, based on this discouraging test? It's probably still too early to say.

Sites powered by "Article Friendly"

While clicking on the search results (see the previous post), I noticed that many of the sites have similar layout, menu links, service pages and even "favicon" :-).
Compare, for example http://come-and-read.com/ and http://articlepile.com/

My first thought was: they all belong to the same owner, just with different "skins". I could not confirm that by checking their IPs, DNS and WHOIS records. There were some matches, but most of the results differ.

Then I noticed "Powered By: Article Friendly" at the bottom. Search by that phrase revealed a hundred more "article" sites. (Google said there were more than two thousands pages having the phrase, but refused to show more than twenty actual results, for some reason). Yahoo and Bing gave slightly more.

I manage to receive additional results by searching for a quite unique phrase from the "Sign Up" page:
"Please submit your site in this manner: http://www.yourdomain.com, and NO Affiliate links. Your account will be deleted for this"

What I learned so far about Article Friendly:

(Excerpts from http://www.articlefriendly.net/ - Jan.30, 2010)

• Article Friendly is an Enterprise Class article publishing script for php & mysql.
• You too can easily join the content goldmine that draws users to your site(s) and can increase your Adsense $ dollars $, and join the ranks of admired article publisher sites!
• Authors, you may submit your quality articles for article submission to hundreds of Article Friendly, Article Dashboard, Article Beach & ArticleMS sites! All these script site owners can sign their sites up for our Free Article Submission Service, and have quality articles delivered directly to their databases!
• How do I get articles? Very easily! Besides the ton's of live authors you will soon be seeing submitting articles on your site, there are three major FREE article submission services, and the scripts to accept those articles directly to your database are included for FREE with your Article Friendly purchase.
• Get two free bonuses with your purchase of Article Friendly Pro! You'll also get a pre-filled AF Pro database with over 4,000 authors and nearly 40,000 Articles! And along with that, your other free bonus is many hundreds of PLR articles that you can rewrite and submit to article directories as your own! That should get you on the fast track to article publishing...

So, the business idea is: purchase a web application that will "enhance" your site with a constantly growing set of pages. Place Google AdSense (or any other Pay-Per-Click ads) on those pages - and go play golf :-)

That reminds me the PPC boom a few years ago. Remember "GoTo", "FindWhat", "Ah-Ha", "Kanoodle", etc, etc.? Google was flooded with pages having no content, just PPC links. It was virtually impossible to find a real commercial website (hotels, cruises, and so on) because first 10 pages were all "PPC content" clones.... Until Google developed an algorithm of finding them and banned them all!

Is this a new way of flooding Google? I'll continue the research and will find the answer. Stay tuned.