If you promote your articles by strategically building backlinks to them, here is something to consider: After the recent spate of article deletions by eHow, during which two of my own articles were removed, I realized that the links pointing to my eHow articles would continue to feed eHow and inhibit my articles’ moving up in search engine results when I moved them to other venues. eHow redirects links to deleted articles to other internal pages, so they continue to benefit from deleted content.

I knew that I had some Propellor links to articles that both eHow and I had deleted, but was not able to find a way to delete those links, nor to “Un-Stumble” any previously Stumbled articles. I was, however, able to “Un-Digg” Dugg articles, which was some consolation. I discussed this with a friend, who also writes about earning residual income online, and he said that he keeps a spreadsheet of backlinks to his articles, which helps him to redirect those links if articles are deleted or moved. I wish I’d thought of that, but I haven’t been keeping track of mine.

So here is my new, future strategy for building backlinks to articles, that you can hopefully benefit from: I will only point backlinks that I cannot control (edit or delete) to content that I can control in the future. If someone informs me that they are mentioning me on their blog, for example, I will ask them to use anchor text that links to my blog or website–not to an article on a content aggregator site. Any articles or posts I write with backlinks will point to my own blog or website. And I will track my backlinks as Brian suggested.

This way I minimize having to ask others later on, “Uh, can you please change the URL pointing to my article in your blog post of October 11, 2009?”

In a nutshell, a good backlink building strategy for articles is to point backlinks that you can control to articles you cannot control, such as those on web content sites, and save the backlinks that will live on in spite of your wishes, to your own blog posts and web content. This will help you to avoid having your newly transplanted articles compete with your original, defunct articles in the search engines.