Okay, this video (thanks, Howie!) doesn’t refer to eHow specifically. It was released about five weeks after eHow launched their mirrored site in the US that they called a UK site so they could try to excuse themselves from paying for content they didn’t own.
But if it isn’t clear to you yet how and why the fake UK site hurt residual income writers, (besides the fact that eHow decided that it was right and moral not to pay for the duplicate writer-owned content), this video may clarify things for you a bit:
For those curious at only the applicaable part to eHow jump to the 12 min mark and listen to the way Google handles duplicate content on multiple domains (i.e. .com versus .uk). Google will only display one version and it will try to determine the best one. This is likely going to bring up the one that has better SEO on page and off page. This means if you don’t have a network of backlinks to your .com version and the onpage SEO is better for .UK then the UK version hits the SERP page.
This is why people who had lots of backlinks to their .com ehow articles or a long history of .com ehow articles didn’t have the same level of problems that newer members had.
Excellent point, B. Hey, don’t you still owe me a guest post?
Wow, Brian, I guess that just stinks for us newbies then! lol It is a very good point, though. It takes time to build quality articles. Ehow is not a get rich quick scheme! : ) It was so encouraging to see my earnings steadily increase to a decent amount each month! Then it became discouraging in 11/09 when my earnings steadily started dive-bombing to squat! So, I am moving on- time to work smarter and not harder! : )