Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/35159
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I'm a staff writer on a site that puts lots of emphasis on SEO. To that end, they have an SEO editor come back in to our posts after publication.

The editor changes things like the abstract of the piece, tags, and so on, but also often changes the title, headings, and the first couple paragraphs.

Twice now the title change has significantly misdirected the piece; the title no longer describes what I've written about.

Also, these changes often create glaring grammatical errors (including one error where a word was only half-written).

I don't feel comfortable having my name on the byline of a piece that's now poorly written, and if I've already shared the work on social media or other outlets, I am a bit limited.

**Contract Details** The contract with this client is for an entire year, 3 pieces per month. It's the most visited site on the topic at hand (which is my niche), so it provides lots of eye traffic. In this case, that's potentially a bad thing because of the errors.

**What I've Already Done** I emailed the SEO manager after the first incident just a couple weeks ago, and now that she's done it again I emailed the overall blog manager (who is generally not a very kind or receptive person).

After hearing back some general ideas about what they try to do with the title and first few paragraphs, I took it upon myself to do this work _for_ them rather than leave it to them. However, I guess I fell short.

After explaining the errors, I went back into the first post myself and changed the errors to things that make more sense.

It feels like I have to write the piece, do all the detail involved in publishing, monitor and respond to comments (all part of my contract), and then monitor the changes to make sure they communicate the same message I wrote and maintain the integrity of my style, error-free.

Has anyone run into a similar issue? What approaches worked or didn't work?

Original score: 7