Introduction - Dealing with Article Deletions at eHow

eHow currently allows people to post articles without review. However, they have guidelines and standards. Over the years, a LOT of articles have accumulated on the site that do not meet these standards, and this past year eHow has been making an effort to clean up the site.

Every two months or so, they have been making a "sweep", and they go through and delete large numbers of articles. Unfortunately, eHow is not the best at communicating with the membership, and people are often caught unawares. This series of articles is to help you survive these sweeps and avoid having articles deleted in the future.

Here is some quick info for people who have had articles deleted:

• DON'T PANIC
• Your earnings on that article are safe. They did disappear from your articles list - and therefore they are a negative on your list if you are using Q's Earnings Tracker software - but they are still in your "my earnings" page. You will still get paid.
• If you didn't get an email telling you which articles were deleted and why (or if you got an incomplete email) Julie announced last night that they will be resending the messages "tomorrow morning (Pacific Time)" which I believe means today. It could be Friday.
• Your article is not necessarily being judged as "bad." It may be an excellent article that just doesn't fit eHow's style or specific rules.
• eHow's uses inexact terms for some of their reasons. "Spam" for instance, doesn't mean exactly what most people think it does. Upcoming posts will deal with the defiinitions of these terms.
• You can NOT rewrite and post the same article again on eHow, but you are free to publish it anywhere else.
• If you didn't keep a back up of your article, there's some advice in the next post on this blog.
• The links to your deleted article will redirect to another article in eHow's library. This is not an attempt to steal your thunder. Google demands that redirects go somewhere relevant to search. More on this in a later article.
• They only get through a small portion of the articles in any one sweep. So yeah, there is still a lot of junk left on the site. It isn't that those articles are better than yours, it's just that the editors haven't got around to them yet. (And the bad news is, the articles you have left may not have been reviewed yet - they can still be deleted in a future sweep.)
  

Next up - Recovering Your Deleted Articles. (Back to Series Index.)