My Articles' Links Re-Routed to Dengarden Articles

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   eugbugposted 3 months ago

   So I just noticed that a link to my gardening article, which used to be on Dengarden and listed lots of perennial flowers to grow in a garden is now diverted to a new version of the article.
   This is outrageous.
   Another link about ropes diverts to a similar article about ropes. So we're giving free advertising to TAG websites and our backlinks are being used for link juice

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      bravewarriorposted 3 months agoin reply to this

      That sucks, Eugene! Have you contacted Matt about this?

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         eugbugposted 3 months agoin reply to this

         No, not yet. All the previews on Pinterest have also automatically updated to the articles rerouted to on Dengarden. So it seems that all my articles that were doing well had new versions written to cash in on the traffic. Alternatively existing articles were matched to my links. Other links on Pinterest and elsewhere, which originally went to the network sites are  rerouted ok to the articles' location on Discover.

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            bravewarriorposted 3 months agoin reply to this

            I'm confused. Dengarden no longer exists.

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               eugbugposted 3 months agoin reply to this

               It does. There's loads of new articles on it too.

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                  bravewarriorposted 3 months agoin reply to this

                  Then why did HP have us move all of our Dengarden articles to Discover???

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                     eugbugposted 3 months agoin reply to this

                     I presume because they didn't want to have to continuously pay us advertising revenue and a staff writer would just churn out content.

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      Kenna McHughposted 3 months agoin reply to this

      Eugene, How did you figure this out?

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         eugbugposted 3 months agoin reply to this

         I followed a link that I had posted on my Facebook gardening group and it ended up on a Dengarden article that was similar to my one. Well practically exactly the same topic, a list of easy-to-grow flowers for a garden. The preview image in Facebook was my image. Maybe Facebook is substituting similar articles it finds on Dengarden, if it gets a 404 and the rerouting to Discover was omitted for some articles. Similarly for Pinterest. So I guess I shouldn't be ranting and pointing fingers at this stage. There are several other substitued articles too for my links, rather than the links going to Discover.

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            Kenna McHughposted 3 months agoin reply to this

            That is interesting because most of my former DenGarden articles rank low and slowly have fallen. Yeah, the link error is probably the culprit.

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      OldRosesposted 3 months agoin reply to this

      Yup, I just spent several weeks fixing links to my articles on Pinterest.  I don't get a lot of traffic from Pinterest, but I'll be damned if I'm going to give any of it away to TAG.

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         Kenna McHughposted 3 months agoin reply to this

         Caren, it's a mess and so sad.

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      Kenna McHughposted 3 months agoin reply to this

      Eugene, My top-producing article before the move-over fiasco has recovered in Discover and is trending as it did before when it was under Bellatory. I'd like to see Matt post about TAG's usurping our hard work as writers. It will not go well in the writing community at large.

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   PaulGoodman67posted 3 months ago

   Geez, that sounds bad!
   
   From what you say, we've gone from allies to be bolstered and helped to the status of rivals, even enemies!
   
   Paying others to write new articles means that they own the work and they don't have to pay out earnings.

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   eugbugposted 3 months ago

   Turbofuture links don't reroute to Discover either.

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      bravewarriorposted 3 months agoin reply to this

      Eugene, where are you finding Dengarden and Turbofuture? It's my understanding they are now TAG standalone sites and authors have to be invited to post after sending in an accepted pitch.

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         eugbugposted 3 months agoin reply to this

         Dengarden.com still exists.
         When I mentioned Turbofuture, I meant that links I posted on Pinterest and social media don't reroute to articles that were moved to Discover. The Turbofuture.com site no longer exists.

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            bravewarriorposted 3 months agoin reply to this

            Dengarden is now a standalone site. It's no longer associated with HubPages. We were told to move all of our Dengarden articles to Discover just before they broke Dengarden loose.

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   eugbugposted 3 months ago

   I'm after spending the last few hours deleting links to Dengarden from my Facebook page and replacing them with Discover ones. It's quite possible Facebook will slap a ban on Discover, but I'll take the risk.

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      bravewarriorposted 3 months agoin reply to this

      Eugene, don't open yourself to trouble; it's not worth it.

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   PaulGoodman67posted 3 months ago

   The links are just a symptom of a deeper issue.
   
   As far as I can see, once TAG has created new versions of all the best-performing articles, we will be of little further use.

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      eugbugposted 3 months agoin reply to this

      It may be that existing links were routed to existing similar articles. However I don't know whether TAG did this or search engines just find something relevant to match to. Some articles just go to the category homepage on Dengarden or give a 404.

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   Alyssa Nicholposted 3 months ago

   Thank you, Eugene, for highlighting this issue. I just checked on my own articles and I have the same problem. Looks like I'll be spending the day overhauling my linktree and social media sites.

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   ControlledChaos1posted 3 months ago

   If true, this seems really underhanded and shady. Hopefully someone with authority will comment on this.

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