Why We Had To Update The Submission Guidelines
Posted by Editing StaffFor several years now we’ve maintained a good relationship with all parties who use the Content Caboodle service. From authors to readers and also web site and eZine/newsletter publishers who reuse the fresh and valuable content from our database. We struck a nice balance right at the start with liberal guidelines and terms of service that were friendly to each group of users.
However, over the last few months there has been a large increase in the number of authors and marketers who were trying to exploit our liberal policies in attempts to “game” search engines and even to “trick” our readers with misleading and sometimes hidden links in their articles and resource boxes.
The overwhelming majority of our authors are good people submitting articles that are often entertaining and typically legitimate resources, but those few bad apples try to spoil things for everyone and we had to act to protect the interests of all our users.
Content Caboodle provides a great opportunity for authors and marketers to gain exposure for their topics, products and web sites. I took a screen shot of our stats a few mornings ago when we posted the updated Submission Guidelines to show this:
Traffic stats taken on January 6, 2010
That image was taken on the morning of the 6th, but you can see that we’re getting over 6,000 visits per day which account for an average of about 20,000 page views daily–and the majority of that traffic comes from the 3 major search engines in the form of people looking for information or entertainment on a wide variety of topics.
That means that publishing your article(s) with Content Caboodle is a great opportunity for exposure and establishing authority in your market; but it also means that we have a responsibility to all of those “reader” visitors to not subject them to sub-par content or articles that were designed to be misleading or manipulative.
This is why we made the few, minor additions to our Submission Guidelines that we did. As we explained in an email that was sent earlier this week to all registered authors, we reduced the number of live links allowed within article bodies from 3 to 2 because the intention of allowing links in the articles was so that authors could point to external resources for evidence or descriptive purposes. In body links were never intended to be for commercial or SEO purposes, that’s what the resource box is for.
And while most authors have respected this policy, what we found is that those who did would only place 1 or 2 links in their article bodies, while the few authors who tried to abuse the in body links would place the full 3 allowed links.
It was obvious to us that we could still allow legitimate authors to place in body links in their articles and deter malicious attempts at link dumping by simply reducing the number of allowed in body links to 2.
Another change we’ve made was to stop accepting articles on a couple of specific topics, such as gambling and Ugg boots for example. This was not done in any attempt to censor opinions, we want Content Caboodle to remain an open venue for the exchange of ideas and information, but statistical analysis of our traffic trends along with extensive feedback from our user base made it clear that the readers who visit our site have little to no interest in articles on certain topics, and feel that those articles offer very little value to their experience with our service.
For that reason, we determined that it was in everybody’s best interest to no longer accept articles on those specific topics. Authors should see this as a positive. If our readers aren’t interested in a specific subject, it would only be a waste of your time to write and submit articles about that topic here. If you enjoy or need to cover that subject, this lets you know that your time can be better spent submitting those articles to other venues where the readership will be a better fit for your subject matter.
That covers the bulk of the additions and changes we’ve made. You can read the full Submission Guidelines to see what other minor tweaks we’ve added and for a full listing of which topics we are no longer accepting submissions on.
Just as when we started several years ago, these updated guidelines are intended to maintain the friendly balance of providing a quality service to every group of users who visit and participate in our service.
One Response to “Why We Had To Update The Submission Guidelines”
By Content Caboodle - Roberta on Jan 9, 2010 | Reply
Just a quick update to announce that our RSS feeds will now contain the full Author’s Resource Box content as well as your articles.
In the past we didn’t do this because most of our early authors were focused on increasing their article page views over all else, but we have had enough feedback recently from authors who wish to ensure that their personal Bio’s and resource links get as much promotion as possible that we’ve decided to now include the full resource content with your articles in the RSS feeds.
We know this will make many of you very happy.