The eHow UK Fiasco- What is Up with eHow's Backlinking?

IF IT LOOKS LIKE A SCAM, SMELLS LIKE A SCAM AND TASTES LIKE A SCAM, IS eHOW UK A SCAM?

I am going to post what I wrote on US eHow's Community Chatter Forum Boards today, just in case it manages to get 'disappeared'.

(I'll be filling in some backstory on the whole thing tomorrow).

"I'd still like an answer to why ALL of the US articles were not just taken down from the UK Site as originally promised? Why all the extra work to redirect instead? And, will the 'fix' for the newer articles still ending up on the UK site be to just 'redirect' them as well? That makes no sense, and has not been addressed ONCE. Why the complicated redirected 'fix', when simply removing all US non flat-rate eHow articles could just have been removed and coded not to be listed in UK thereafter?

Obviously, I am not stupid, and there MUST be a reason a choice was made to deal with it the way it has. If it was losing eHow money, no doubt they would have been removed immediately. Which suggests it is beneficial to eHow to approach this the way they are, by continuing to post them there and redirect them back.

When I Google 'eHow UK' and click on the site, first thing I noticed yesterday was that many of the featured articles were from the US. Going into eHow article search and typing in 'California' pulled up many articles that were not redirected to the US site. In fact, the first one I clicked on, "How to Sell a Used Car in California", did not redirect... and based on the comments, the article has been up since 2007 in the US. In the sidebar are 5 more articles by the some author, none of which redirect, but clicking on the author leads you to a blank page with no articles or comments. Other authors I clicked on had articles listed but no personal info, and some had a variation of one or the other. A few of the US authors articles did redirect. Obviously there is quite a lot of mess going on, and quite a lot of 'splainin' to do.

Also, when I click on the third link on Google when I search for eHow UK, it comes up with Garry Crystal, eHow UK
, and clicking on that I see that this person is a UK writer who somehow although being a novice with only 110 points (I have 2240 points after 8 months and 19 articles, and many comments) wrote about 80 articles, about 70 of which were supposedly written on 08/01/07. Only 4 of them have any comments, and even though he is described as a published author, there are no affiliate links or personal links in any of the articles, only 1 pertinent link to a non-paying info site in each article. Now, how could anyone write/publish 70 articles in one day, and if the UK writers were never getting paid, why would anyone write them or not put backlinks into the resources? And if they were getting paid residuals, why no backlinks? And only has 2 friends and 4 comments after 2 1/2 years?

Now, why do all of Garry's articles, since he claims he lives in the UK, redirect to the US URL? It seems to me pretty obvious all of the US/UK problems have occurred purposefully in order to build up huge backlinks for the UK site. Or eHow is flat-paying US writers to write UK articles, post them in the UK, backdate them, and then redirect them back to US?

SOMETHING REALLY STINKS. "
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It's getting all over... I'll compile all the links I've found tomorrow- for now, here's a link that's been following it as well- You'll notice I haven't removed my eHow sidebar... partly because I don't know what to do with it, and partly because they are holding some of my articles.