There are several reasons this can happen, and our system sends an email notification containing the specifics in each case, however we thought this was a good time to give a general overview of our processes so you can better understand them.

The first and most obvious reason is when it’s found that an article which slipped passed our editorial reviews is in violation of any of our submission guidelines, including if the content violates another person’s copyright.

Beyond that, getting an article published with Content Caboodle requires that it pass through 2 manual reviews. It used to be a single review, but we have been able to expand our editing and review staff to the point where each article is now given a general review, and then a final review by a senior editor prior to publishing.

However, passing these two reviews simply means that your article has met the minimum requirements for publication as per our submission guidelines.

Once live on our site, your article is constantly monitored in a number of ways to see if it is passing the “reader sniff test”, and when an article appears to be failing this test, it may be pulled from circulation.

Basically, what we look for and try to measure is whether or not readers who visit your article find it valuable, entertaining, or insightful. That’s the “reader sniff test”.

We have a very intricate system in place for measuring this, which encompasses everything from direct and active user engagement (article reporting, comments, social mentions) to involved calculations that are made against the article traffic data, using factors like incoming links, average time readers spend on the article page and much more.

The bottom line is, we strive to provide an excellent service to both readers and authors here at Content Caboodle, and while our submission guidelines are the minimum requirements for publishing with us, they shouldn’t be viewed as the end goals by authors when creating their articles.

We would rather encourage all of our authors to focus on building trust and authority with the readers who will view their articles by creating high quality, valuable content. It will server you better in your endeavors, and help to keep Content Caboodle a valuable service for all.

One final note, if one of your articles is pulled from circulation you may edit it and resubmit it for publication. However, we suggest you first review that article and try to understand why it wasn’t connecting with readers, maybe you can correct the problem or perhaps writing a new piece instead will be a better use of your time.

Technorati Tags: articles, submission guidelines

The truth is, our editors and submission reviewers have always been good at weeding out articles which were machine written, and users who were employing automated submission programs, but still there was a rise in the number of catches we were making and that’s what prompted our public announcement of a crackdown.

As a result of that announcement we received a ton of positive feedback from members, and even more from visitors.

I have to stray off topic just a bit here to say we have an exceptional class of visitors coming to this site and reading our member’s articles. They are both inquisitive and engaged, as displayed by the insightful questions they ask in our article comments areas, and the comments they provide when using our “Report This Article” feature any time they feel an article is misleading, abusive or violates one of our terms of service or submission guidelines.

From all of the feedback we’ve received in the last few weeks, a number of things have become clear to us.

1. Many of our members and regular visitors are very passionate about their use of this site–that’s a great thing
2. The majority of articles which displease our readers, despite conforming to our submission guidelines, tend to be on the shorter end in terms of word counts, and often push the boundary of informative vs. sales pitch–this is bad
3. An overwhelming number of articles that readers have indicated they dislike are related to Internet Marketing and Making Money Online–this was predictable

So, as we’ve always done when our readers and members take the time to give us their opinions and ideas, we took all of this feedback into consideration and have updated our submission guidelines as follows:

1. All articles must now contain a minimum of 450 words. This rule itself will not force submissions to be of higher quality, but it will weed out some of the low quality gibberish from those who aren’t concerned at all with providing quality content, and it will make the job of spotting poor quality submissions even easier for our reviewers.
2. There will no longer be any second chances for members who break our rules and use automated software to write or submit their articles. We have tried to be lenient in the past, especially when the violation was only in the submission process, however time and again these members simply became repeat offenders, so now, just as with anyone who uses automated means to inflate their page view counts, we are taking a Zero Tolerance approach with all automated software use in any interactions with our service. Anyone caught using automated software for any purpose related to our site or service will have all of their articles removed from our system, and their account terminated.
3. All articles related to Internet Marketing and/or Making Money Online will now receive a double review process, first by one of our regular article reviewers to ensure it meets our standard submission guidelines, and if it passes there it will then be sent to one of our senior editors for content review where it will be scrutinized for accuracy. By that we mean if you claim you can push a button and make millions of dollars in your article, you had better provide proof to support your claims, or we will not accept it for publishing. We do not want to ban these topics outright, but our service is not the place for publishing misleading or false information. Our senior editors will use their own judgement to determine if the content, tone and claims in these articles will provide value to our readers or not.
4. Health related articles which make medical claims of any kind must include citations or reference links to recognized or authoritative sources which validate those claims, or they will be declined. It’s acceptable and encouraged for writers to state their personal opinions or theories in an article, however when you do so it should be clearly evident that it is an opinion or theory, and not be stated as fact without supporting evidence. In other words, it’s fine to say that the latest Watermelon Diet helped you lose weight, but if you claim it also helped thousands of other people lose weight, or that it cures Cancer there had better be some corroborating evidence to back up those claims, and you must link to that evidence from your article or resource box.

On a closing note, we aren’t adjusting our policies to make things harder for writers. In fact, by following our guidelines it will make it easier for writers to provide higher quality articles for readers, and to establish themselves as authorities on their topics.

Technorati Tags: articles, submission guidelines

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.

Technorati Tags: articles, links, submission guidelines