Well over a year ago I wrote an article titled Baseball’s All Time Greatest Teams. I put a lot of time and research into the article and thought it was worth something. So I submitted it to a site that paid up front money for articles only to be informed that the article “was too general a topic and lacked broad appeal and would not generate sufficient search engine based traffic.”  It was known that the content site used a computer formula based upon keywords in articles to determine if articles could or would generate traffic to the content site. So I rewrote the article and added more keywords to it and resubmitted it. I got back the same reply so I added even more keywords and resubmitted once again only to receive the same reply again.

Frustrated, I decided the site was never going to pay me upfront money for the article. The site does pay a performance bonus based upon page views but I’d learned over time I was better off submitting articles to Triond because Triond paid me much better based solely upon page views. Besides the site had rejected what I thought was a pretty good article. So I submitted Baseball’s All Time Greatest Teams to Triond and it was published soon after. However when I tried to click the link from Triond’s email saying the article was published I could not access it. I was going to try to view the article later but got busy and forgot about it for a few days. But when I did finally view the article I also logged into Triond and was astounded to see that Baseball’s All Time Greatest Teams had over 20,000 page views!

I had never done anywhere close to that number with my articles. A Sopranos article I wrote did do over 8,000 page views but that was because it was near the end of the Series when I wrote and submitted it.

Not only was I shocked at the page views but I couldn’t help thinking back to what the content site where I had first tried to publish the article had said when they rejected it for pay. “Too general a topic and lacked broad appeal and would not generate sufficient search engine based traffic.”  So much for their keyword based computer formula. I knew another content producer from that site who had been paid $50.00 for an article about his bad back and all the ways he had tried to treat it. The last time I talked to that content producer his back article had done 89 total page views in well over 1 year and Baseball’s All Time Greatest Teams is now well over 24,000 total page views.

All of which makes me wonder just how well keyword based computer formulas really work.