What should eHow members do for the short term?

Many at eHow (most?) are sickened with the knowledge of how they were betrayed. But most are a bit scattered it seems, and wondering what they should do now, at least for the next few weeks or months, while this scene works its way to its end result.

I don't pretend to have a crystal ball, but of course, I must put in my two cents. These suggestions are designed to prevent the loss of more earnings during the time eHow is fixing the problem and to minimize losses if you prefer to remove all articles and cut ties with eHow.

The first thing all eHow WCP members should do immediately is STOP publishing articles. Of course, this might feel good as a protest, but the real reason is because everything you publish is still being loaded onto the UK site, and the UK versions of many of the articles are still outranking or even completely crowding out, the USA version of the articles in the search engine results. That means you will earn less, if anything. Once these articles are loaded onto the UK site, and indexed by the search engines your links to them are locked in, until eHow removes them all from the UK site AND they drop off the search engine listings. Consider this, from Rich himself:

Logically, if you remove your content and the search engines re-index the site, then your eHow article that you've removed will not show up on the search engines anymore.  Plus, if you do decide to re-post those articles after removing them, you're just going to have to wait again to have those articles re-indexed, pending until they show up on the search engines again-- and I think many of us know how well those articles are ranked on the search results as of today. 

Thanks,
Rich

There is more involved, a few more little reasons you shouldn't remove articles from eHow just yet. Interested? Check out the forum. Now, if you understand all that is happening, and you aren't in need of money and don't mind eHow using your articles without compensating you, then by all means go ahead and continue publishing there. Everyone else take heed.

The second thing eHow WCP members should do, in my opinion, is to stop giving backlinks to your articles on eHow, unless you will be able to change those backlinks if needed. Every backlink to an eHow article is a backlink to eHow, and eHow UK, effectively helping them to make more money, which they aren't sharing with you. Moreover, if you cannot change the backlinks yourself, then if you do remove the article, eHow keeps those backlinks, and you article cannot benefit from that backlink when you publish it anywhere else.

The last thing eHow WCP members should do now is to use this time to build your blogs, article libraries on other sites, and build good, solid, anchored backlinks to them all. Try to get "do follow" links whenever you can, and I suggest you write new articles that are related to your eHow articles (at least your best earning articles), and use slightly different but still strong keywords in the anchored backlinks. This will help you to build up your authority and beat or match eHow in the search engines for your article title, once you remove your article from eHow. You won't be actually trying to compete head to head against the huge eHow; you're going to be aiming yourself just slightly off that keyword onto one that is still very strong, and building your links and new articles around that. When you feel you have enough to rank on search results on the site you've chosen to put your article, then you can remove your eHow article, adjust it slightly for the keyword changes and publish. If you don't feel you can change your keywords and still earn as well, you can do the same thing, keeping the keywords the same, but it will take you longer to be ready to move the article off eHow.