InfoBarrel Editorial Guidelines

Editorial Guidelines for Submitting To Infobarrel.com

These editorial guidelines are designed to help you understand what we accept and don't accept for inclusion in our site. Before you submit to Infobarrel.com, we would appreciate if you would please read this page first.

1. Infobarrel.com Editorial Guidelines: (CONTENT QUALIFICATIONS)

To Be Qualified For Our Site, your Article:

1. MUST BE AN ORIGINAL ARTICLE WRITTEN BY YOU. Only submit content that you have written and or hold the copyrights too.

2. MUST NOT BE AN ARTICLE YOU TOOK FROM THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OR PURCHASED. If you used a ghost writer to write your articles, you MUST have an EXCLUSIVE LICENSE that *only* allows your name to be associated with the articles produced for you. Do not waste your time or ours by buying article packs that have non-exclusive licenses as we reject those articles. We will never publish an article that has already been published elsewhere.

3. MUST BE informative and share your expertise. Include tips, strategies, techniques, case-studies, analysis, opinions and commentary in your articles. Do not waste time by submitting mostly quoted material, we are looking for unique content.

4. MUST NOT be a press release, advertisement, sales letter, promotional copy, or blatant and excessive self-promotion or hype.

5. MUST HAVE proper English, spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization and sentence structure. If English is not your first language, get somebody whose native language is English to proof read your article. If your article does not exhibit good English it will not be accepted.

6. MUST NOT contain: pornography/adult material, hate or violence-oriented, suggest racial intolerance, advocate against any individual or group, have insulting, obscene, degrading tone, or contain profanity.

7. MUST NOT contain information on: Hacking/cracking content, bomb creation, support for terrorism/ radicalism/ religious fanaticism, illicit drugs or drug paraphernalia, steroid use or advocacy, weapon/ firearms/ ammunition/ balisongs/ butterfly knives or brass knuckles, or the promotion of hard alcohol/tobacco-related products or prescription drugs.

8. MUST NOT contain any content that is a violation of any law, be considered defamatory, libelous, or infringes on the legal rights of others.

9. MUST NOT be a submission of the exact same article as one that you already submitted. Some authors have submitted the same article multiple times with only a few words changed in the body -- we reject these and ban authors who engage in this practice.

10. MUST NOT include a reply to a personal email, letter or other correspondence.

11. MUST NOT contain excessive and/or bolded keywords/ phrases. Please limit the amount of bolding and italicizing in your content.

2. Infobarrel.com Editorial Guidelines: (FORMAT)

1. ARTICLE TITLE:

1. Your Title MUST Be In Upper and Lower Case Letters With The First Letter of Each Major Word Capitalized.

2. We will not accept your TITLE in all CAPS.

3. It is not required that you capitalize common words such as "a" - "the" - "to" - "for" etc, we accept these either way.

4. We do not accept QUOTES around your entire TITLE.

5. Do NOT end your TITLE with a period.

6. Please do not submit Microsoft Word smart quotes in your TITLE. This includes quotes, apostrophe's, double dashes, and 3 dots in a row. Replace smart quotes with standard quotes/apostrophe's/double dashes/or 3 periods in a row.

7. Refrain from excessive repetitive punctuation in your TITLE. One exclamation "!" or question mark "?" is enough to make a point.

8. We do not allow HTML tags of any kind in your TITLE.

9. Your TITLE must begin with the first word flush to the LEFT of the TITLE submission box.

10. We do not allow your AUTHOR NAME or any WEBSITE URL to be in your TITLE.

11. Your TITLE must not be keyword stuffed (too many redundant keywords used over and over again), but rather should read as a natural language TITLE that any human could easily appreciate. Do not over-optimize your TITLE please.

12. We do not accept One Word as the article TITLE, a MINIMUM of two unique words is required.

13. We do not accept articles that use slang terms or profanity in the TITLE.

14. We do not accept articles that do not deliver on the article title. You must deliver in the article body on the promises made in the article title.

2. ARTICLE BODY:

1. Must be a minimum of 250 words and no more than 5,000 words. For us, an ideal article size is 400-750 words.

2. Please do not repeat your TITLE and AUTHOR NAME at the top of the ARTICLE BODY. A sub title is fine, but do NOT repeat the exact title.

3. Copyrights must be at the bottom of your article. If you put it at the top of your article, we will move it to the bottom of the article body.

4. If you sell hard in the ARTICLE BODY by including your URL or product pitch or blatant self-promotion, we will toss your article without notice. The SIGNATURE BOX is where you get to pitch yourself or your website address.

5. Your article body MUST deliver on what is promised in the title. We do not accept teaser links or phrases that require a reader to click away from the article or reference another source in order to receive the full benefit of what has been promised.
6. At the very END of your ARTICLE BODY, please help us by removing any excess vertical spaces and do not include any HTML tags that would create or force the creation of additional vertical spaces after the end of your ARTICLE BODY.

7. Your article MUST be single spaced, MUST use appropriate paragraph breaks, and MUST use correct formatting for bulleted or numbered lists. We will not accept articles that are not single spaced, that do not use paragraphs to appropriately break up the body text, or that provide bulleted or numbered lists that are not formatted correctly.

3. WEBSITE LINKS/URLS There is a total limit of (4) active or inactive links allowed in the article, which consists of both the BODY and the SIGNATURE BOX. Links to other content on InfoBarrel do NOT count towards this limit.

1. Maximum of (2) "Self-Serving" active or inactive links/URLs to a website that you own, control, or have an interest in.
2. Avoid "Self-Serving" links in the first paragraph of articles. This is subjective and up to the discretion of your manager. If you choose to place a link in the first paragraph of your article your article may be approved with the link removed from your content.
   
3. Maximum of (2) active or inactive non-self serving links/URLs to a website that you do not own, control, or have an interest in which adds value to the article.

4. Confine your self-serving links to your SIGNATURE BOX unless the link provides value to reader. The article BODY is your "GIVE" and the SIGNATURE BOX is your "TAKE."

6. We do not accept links that use HTML to add style attributes to the link, URL, or text link description.

7. We do not accept links formatted with Smart Quotes by using MS WORD.

8. We will auto format valid URLs included in your SIGNATURE BOX.

9. We will NOT auto-format URLs that are included in the BODY of your article.

10. Your links MAY NOT contain a file to be downloaded of any type.

11. We do not knowingly allow any URLs in any of our articles that are banned by Google or if your website engages in questionable SEO practices -- we may reject your articles.

12. We do not accept articles that have the same ACTIVE link more than once. Do not submit duplicate URLs.

13. We do not allow articles which have strategic keyword anchor text links in the body to your domain that do not add informational value to the article. Any use of anchored text links to websites that you own should add value to the article topic rather than stand out as an obvious abuse of anchored text link. The goal with this policy is to be a good net citizen by only allowing articles that add value with the anchored text links rather than for pure SEO reasons. Please limit your anchor text link length to 3 words.

Example: Within your article, you link the word "bird dog" to an article that you wrote about bird dogging. This is a good example of an anchored text link vs. linking the same text to your home page as it doesn't really add value.

13. We will not accept articles with links (in the Article Body or Signature Box) to adult-oriented websites, including but not limited to websites that include pornography, adult-oriented sexual content.

14. We do not allow links to websites that are under construction. Websites must be active and have content in order for you to link to them from your article. We will reject your article if it contains a link of this nature.

4. TAGS: Adding the top keywords related to your article helps us to bring more traffic to your article.

1. Please make sure you put a line break between each TAG.

2. Ideally, your tags should be optimized based on the most commonly searched keywords as published by Google.com for your particular niche. It helps to use a good keyword research tool to help you determine which ones are best to use.

3. You should have a minimum of 2 Tags and a maximum of 5.

4. We do not accept tags that are completely unrelated to the content of your article.

5. CATEGORY:

1. ARTICLE CATEGORY or SUB-CATEGORY: Please choose the best category or sub category based on the theme of your article and not the theme of your business. Here are some general hints on how to select the best category for categories that are often confused.

3. Infobarrel.com Editorial Guidelines: (AFFILIATE PROGRAMS):
   
   Affiliate links will be NOT allowed if the link is to a domain name you own which forward/redirects to the affiliate link from the top-level of the domain name. Any link that links directly to an affiliate link will be reviewed for appropriateness. If we find that the link is inappropriate or hazardous to the user it will be removed.