We have implemented some new article submission restrictions today, designed to help speed up the article approval process and further eliminate “article spam”.

The new restrictions we have applied are as follows

1. No-one shall have more than TWO articles awaiting admin approval.
2. No-one shall have more than FIVE articles awaiting member moderation

These restrictions will ensure that your articles will be approved more quickly and we will no longer have runs of several articles published by the same author in the moderation queue and “recently approved articles” list.

It is also our hope that these improvements will motivate more authors to moderate articles, as doing this is sure to move any articles you have waiting in moderation higher up the list of articles to be moderated. Moderating articles yourself will remove the “articles awaiting member moderation” restriction more quickly and enable you to submit articles again.

If you have any comments, please leave them below

Thanks

Dan

The reasons for rejection script is working again now, however… if your article was rejected before today the reason(s) why, that we have displayed for you may not be accurate, or even there at all.  If there are no reasons why your article has been rejected check the submission terms page.

Here is an easy list of what we do not like

1. Articles submitted with a Title that is not in Title case
2. Article submitted with a link to a website (or domain name) in the title.
   • For example… Low Insurance Quotes from domain.com
3. Article author not in Title case
4. Article author that is anything other than Firstname Lastname
   • We don’t like  “SEO Expert” that is not your name.
   • We don’t like John (with no last name)
   • We don’t like Paula Y. your last name is not Y.

   If you want to display your qualifications and honors in your name, that’s fine.

5. Any self serving links in the first 3 paragraphs. (Putting a line of white space between 2 sentences does not turn them into paragraphs).
6. Bad formatting.
   • E.G. All one block of text, “smart quotes” They display like this… “smart quotes” aren’t very smartâ€
7. Articles that are pasted from a Rich Text editor without using the “Paste from Word” tool provided. — This creates very “dirty” code on your articles pages and makes the site as a whole less search engine friendly.
8. Articles in the wrong category… Category selection is VERY important. Our articles are fed into targeted sites, Gardening articles into articles about gardening for example. If we allow articles about say, article marketing to  go into the gardening category, our content partners will look elsewhere for their content and you (everyone) will get LESS traffic.
9. Bad links in the resource box or article body — It’s not uncommon for people to not enter links into their articles correctly.

ALL the above issues can be fixed easily, but when you multiply fixing an easy task by 100, it becomes a hard task… unless you have 100 people too. All the issues above are 100% avoidable. The only way to avoid these problems is to educate the people who are making them. That’s why we will no longer fix these minor issues for you.

If you have been suspended from submitting articles, don’t take offence, most people have and it’s probably for (next to) nothing! We are not telling you that we don’t think you can write, just that you have not complied with our submission rules to the letter. Our strictness here may be a little OTT in some cases, but eventually it will make the site better for everyone. Traffic is up despite us publishing fewer articles… perhaps BECAUSE we publish fewer articles now.

Please help us drive more traffic to your web sites by complying with the submission rules and taking care when you submit your articles.Fix the articles that we may have rejected and just see the difference in traffic you get from this site when we DO publish your content.

If you have any comments, please let me know.

Thanks
Dan

This is just a quick update to let you know that if you have articles rejected at article-content-king, you may not know exactly why.  Instead of showing you the specific reasons you article has been rejected, you may see every reason we reject articles on instead.  We will have this fixed soon. 

If you have rejected articles, you will be unable to submit any more until you fix the issues with your article.  I am sorry this bug will make that a little harder. However, if you read the submission terms, you will probably be able to see why your article has been rejected. 

We reject over 80% of the articles that are submitted to the site, often not due to the quality of the article, more to do with formatting, bad links or use of HTML tags that we do not allow. The most common reason for rejection is “Pasting from a rich text editor, without using the paste from word tool”.  When you do this, you add a lot of unnecessary HTML code along with the article. This code “junks up” the pages on our site and makes them less search engine friendly. So rather than fixing this ourselves every time someone doesn’t use the paste from word tool provided, we reject your articles in the hope that you will see what you are doing wrong. There may be nothing wrong with your article itself, but the code behind it is the reason why we rejected it. We want nice clean pages on the site from good attentive authors. 

I am sure you want good attentive admins actively promoting your articles (after we approve them). I’d rather have 50 unique, well written articles written by dedicated authors, than any number of articles submitted by some “seo company” trying to build keyword links for their client. Just learn how we want you to submit articles and I guarantee you will get traffic. More traffic than you get from almost any other article directory you submit articles to perhaps?

If you have rejected articles, please do not take offense, just fix the issues and submit again. When you get approved, you will get more traffic… because we are so strict about the articles that we approve.

I know a lot of people submitting articles these days are primarily focused on the SEO benefits of article marketing and there is nothing really wrong with that. What is wrong is focusing solely on getting a back link.  The reason why we have seen a rapid increase in traffic over the last few months at article content king and the graph keeps going up and up is because the quality of content we publish has increased dramatically since introducing the community moderation system.

Visitors to the site now find more value in it and spend a lot more time browsing articles. According to analytics our page views per user from Google search traffic has increased from 1.34 to 7.8 pages per visit over the last 60 days.  This can only mean one thing… A lot better chance of someone reading YOUR article after coming from such a highly targeted source as Google search.  That is what you should be really interested is how keenly the directories you submit articles to moderate their content.

If you think about it, an article directory is a “community content site”.  If your content sits in a “bad community” where the visitor is put off by the other content your articles are published along side, you are not going to do yourself a lot of good. Could this even harm you?

We are going to great lengths to filter out the bad content, even before it reaches the community moderation system. What you get to decide, by voting, is how highly ranked in the category listing a particular article appears. There is only so much room on the first page, this system ensures the best articles always stay at the top.

The better the quality of site your content is published on the better it is for you. As long as your articles are of decent quality too.  If their not, they won’t be published on article content king at all.

That’s why is the community moderation system important for authors.

As an author at article content king, you should see it as your responsibility to maintain the quality standards of the site by submitting well written, informative  unique articles and doing your fair share of article moderation. That’s how you will begin to unlock a lot of quality traffic from the site and a nice income from advertising credits.

You Also Get More Credits For Moderating.

As you probably know already,  we operate a really awesome revenue sharing program at article content king that gives you a completely fair share of the income your articles generate. We convert your unique visitors into credits and allow you to display your own ads on the site in exchange for these credits.

Recognizing  that the driving force behind the advertising income is the quality of content published on the site, we are awarding 2 advertising credits for every article moderated. Every time you moderate an article, you earn 2 credits for doing so.

Moderating articles is not compulsory, you do not have to moderate article in order to be able to submit articles, but if you care about the community your content is being published in you should do your fair share of moderation. That’s how the ad space you control on the site will become most valuable to you.

Moderation is quick and easy. Just click the “moderate articles” link in your members area, visit the first article in the queue, read it, rate it and submit.

If you have any comments, I would love to hear them