Does Your Article Content Belong To You Or Can You Control It?

One of the major concerns for many people getting into article marketing is whether or not they have control over their articles. If you submit your articles to article directories you should be prepared for some unauthorized use of your articles. It’s going to happen. You really can’t prevent it.

A lot of time can be spent looking for content thieves and people using your articles in ways in which you don’t approve. But should you be concerned?

The way it should work is like this: You submit your article to an article directory and a website owner or e-zine publisher uses it to present their readers with quality content. They use your author bio with links intact. But you’ll often see people using articles without activating the links in the author bio or by placing the articles on pages with Google AdSense. What should you do?

First, you should contact the site owner and ask them to remove your content if you don’t want it there, or you could ask them to activate your author bio links. If they refuse or you can’t contact the site owner for some reason then submit a spam report to Google. It takes a while, but Google will often remove content if it can be proven that webmasters are violating Google guidelines. This works if the site owner is using articles without authorization and using Google AdSense in ways not approved of.

Often, however, you might have to take the extra step of contacting the site owner’s hosting company and reporting them. Many hosts will not tolerate unauthorized SEO tactics because it hurts them and their other customers. Go to Whois.net and look up who owns the site and that person’s web host. But you can often spend too much time chasing people down and not getting any work done. You’ll have to ask yourself if it’s worth it in the end.