Ubscure Article Directory Blog

Credit: fotosearch.com

Hey guys,

In an effort to increase the amount of visitor interaction on Ubscure (and to entice users to stick around for a bit (: ) I’ve added a “Related Videos” section at the end of each article. This will give a reader the option of watching videos related to your article topic. If anything, this will increase the amount of time that the user sticks around on your page. This will help keep people from clicking out of your page immediately after they get done reading your article.

The videos will open in a pop-up screen that is easily closed. When the video screen is closed, the viewer will be returned to your article. Once again, this helps ensure that the reader stays on your page a bit longer.

I’ll be testing the system out over the next couple of weeks to see what kinds of improvements (or problems) it will bring to Ubscure. Hope you guys enjoy!

So originally I thought that it would be okay to let people post articles without having me check them over first. This worked well for a while, and it was great because it really reduced my workload. However, now that spammers have caught on to the site it seems that I’m going to have to change the policies for everyone.

Lately, Ubscure has been getting tons of spammy crap from a few people. Spammers have been submitting content that doesn’t even make sense when you read it and content that is just a long list of keywords. Apparently spammers haven’t gotten the message that this type of article “writing” doesn’t work anymore. This used to be fine back in the good ‘ole days of the internet when search engines didn’t really care about the quality of the content. But now, companies like Google actually keep track of things like keyword density and they have a keen eye for spam. Google even keeps track of how much time a visitor spends on the site and factors this into their ranking algorithm. As you can imagine, visitors to Ubscure are not going to stay long if they keep seeing spam on the site. If I continue to allow spam to be posted on Ubscure, this will hurt not only our search engine placement but also our credibility.

Spammers have ruined it for everyone by forcing me to no longer allow instant article submissions. It also makes my job a lot harder because I’ll now have to go through every article by hand, by myself. I apologize to those of you who are legitimate article writers. I know many of you work very hard to produce quality content that people will actually read. The good news is that now that spam is going to decrease on Ubscure, we should actually see higher search engine placements for our content. This means that those of you who are actually legitimate article writers will see an increase in traffic to your individual articles. Hooray!

I can’t give an estimate of how long it will take to get articles approved anymore. It could take days for me to get to your article since this site gets hundreds of submissions per day. The other problem is that this is not a full time job for me. I have tons of other work to do on top of maintaining this site.

So, moral of the story = we’ll all have to be a bit more patient.

Once again, sorry to those of you who actually post useful content. I’ll try to approve your submissions as quickly as possible.

Best,

Patrick

Owner – Ubscure