The Source For Article Distribution

Editorial Guidelines For Submitting To the ScoopQuest Article Directory

These editorial guidelines are designed to help you understand what we accept and don't accept for inclusion in our article database. Before you submit to our site, we'd appreciate if you'd read this page first. :-)

1. ScoopQuest Article Directory Guidelines: (CONTENT QUALIFICATIONS)
   
   
To Be Qualified For Our Site, Your Article:


• MUST BE AN ORIGINAL ARTICLE THAT YOU WROTE. If you work for an author as an employee or contractor and are submitting the article, please submit the article as if it was from the original author including his or her email address and name.
  
  
• MUST NOT BE AN ARTICLE YOU RIPPED-OFF FROM THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OR BOUGHT. If you did hire 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. Why do we do this? #1) It makes you look like a fraud because you're putting your name on someone else's works that already may have hundreds or thousands of other authors who already put their name on the exact same works and #2) We do not want more than one copy of any article in our directory.
  
  
• MUST BE informative and share your unique expertise. Include tips, strategies, techniques, case-studies, analysis, opinions and commentary in your articles.
  
  
• MUST NOT be a press release, advertisement, sales letter, promotional copy, or blatant and excessive self-promotion or hype.
  
  
• MUST HAVE proper English, spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization and sentence structure. While we know there is a variation in what is considered "proper English," we ask that you at least be consistent within your article. Your article must also be proofed and double checked for accuracy. If English is your second language -- we strongly suggest that you have it proofed by someone who has English as their native tongue before submitting your articles to us.
  
  
• SIMPLE PUNCTUATION RULES: One or two spaces after each period, colon, or semi-colon; Periods should be inside of quotes; When doing "..." -- you should use only 3 dots minimum and maximum; When using dashes, use two in a row, ex: "--"; There is never a space BEFORE a period or BEFORE a comma.
  
  
• MUST NOT contain pornography/adult material, hate or violence-oriented, suggest racial intolerance, advocate against any individual, have insulting-obscene-degrading tone, or contain excess profanity.
  
  
• MUST NOT contain information on: hacking/cracking content, auto-surf program advocacy or promotion, 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.
  
  
• MUST NOT contain any content that is a violation of any law, be considered defamatory, libelous, or infringes on the legal rights of others.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• MUST NOT be a reply to a personal email, letter or other correspondence.




2. ScoopQuest Article Directory Editorial Guidelines: (FORMAT)
   
   
• TITLE: Your Title MUST Be In Upper and Lower Case Letters With The First Letter of Each Major Word Capitalized.
  
  
1. If you submit your TITLE in all CAPS, we will change to "Upper and Lower Caps."
2. It is ok not to capitalize common words such as "a" - "the" - "to" - "for" etc...unless you want to. We accept these either way.
3. Please do not put QUOTES around your entire TITLE. This makes very little sense to us. If you want to use a quote or an apostrophe to call attention to one word or a phrase, this is ok, but the entire TITLE must not have quotes around itself.
4. Do NOT end your TITLE with a period.
5. 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.
6. Refrain from excessive repetitive punctuation in your TITLE. One exclamation "!" or question mark "?" is enough to make a point.
7. We do not allow HTML tags of any kind in your TITLE.
8. We do not allow spaces in your TITLE before you begin your TITLE. In other words, your TITLE should begin with the first word flush to the LEFT of the TITLE submission box.
9. We do not allow your AUTHOR NAME or any WEBSITE URL to be in your TITLE.
10. Please do NOT repeat your TITLE in the ARTICLE BODY.
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.


• TITLE KEYWORD RICHNESS: Your title should be "Keyword Rich." The first 3-4 words of your TITLE determines the success of the article in terms of how much traffic your article will generate...so choose the first 3-4 words wisely.
  
  Example of a Bad Keyword TITLE:
  
  
  Top 9 Ways To Make Money Online
  
  
  Example of a Good Keyword TITLE:
  
  
  Make Money Online - 9 Strategies to Help You Make A Bigger Income
  
  
  
• YOUR FULL AUTHOR NAME: You must include your first and last name as the author of the article.
  
  
1. Your AUTHOR NAME must have a First name and a Last name.
2. We do allow "First name - Last initial" or "First initial - Last Name."
3. We do not allow two initials for your AUTHOR NAME.
4. Your First and Last name must begin with a Capital Letter.
5. We do not allow company names to be your AUTHOR NAME.
6. We do not allow email addresses to be your AUTHOR NAME.
7. We do not allow adjectives or nouns or descriptors to be part of your AUTHOR NAME.
8. You may NOT include your title after your AUTHOR NAME unless you hold a doctorate-level degree (Dr., MD, DDS, PhD, etc.)
9. We do not allow religious titles before or after your name.
10. We do not allow more than ONE author name to have an account. If your article was CO-AUTHORED, then please put the CO-AUTHOR's name in the RESOURCE BOX and we will manually add them as a Co-Author to your article BY-LINE.


1. ATTENTION AFFILIATES: We do accept articles with affiliate links in them.


• ARTICLE BODY: Must be a minimum of 250 words and no more than 3,500 words. For us, an ideal article size is 400-750 words.
  
  
1. Please do not repeat your TITLE and AUTHOR NAME at the top of the ARTICLE BODY. We will remove it.
2. 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.
3. 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 RESOURCE BOX is where you get to pitch yourself or your website address.
4. A Rich Text Editor is provided so you can format the presentation of your article as you like.
   
   
5. Please do not submit articles with excessive HARD LINE BREAKS. A hard line break is when you use the HTML <P> or <BR> tag to force a carriage return rather than allowing each line to wrap naturally. We may either reject or convert any articles that are sent in with hard line breaks. It's ok to force a hard line break when you're making a small list of items but it's not ok to arbitrarily force hard line returns on every single line at a certain character width.
   
   
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.


• WEBSITE ACTIVE LINKS / YOUR URL: We encourage you to be responsible with the use of links in your article. Articles that demontrate blatant misuse or excessive"Self-Serving" links to a website that you own, control or have an interest in will not be accepted.
  
  Whenever possible, please try to confine your self-serving links to your RESOURCE BOX. You may use affiliate links in the body of your article.
  
  There is a total active link limit of (6) active links per article, i.e.: A maximum of (3) "Self-Serving" active links that you have a relationship with and a maximum of (3) active non-self serving links.
  
  
  1. Double check your active links before submitting to be sure they work. Your article will be rejected if your website links do not work.
  2. Microsoft Word smartquotes are never valid HTML code. (ie: Do not prepare your HREF statements in MS Word)
  Example of an invalid URL:
  
  
  Your-Company-Name.com
  
  
  www.your-company-name.com
  
  
  Example of a valid URL:
  
  
  http://Your-Company-Name.com/
  
  
  
  3. We *DO NOT* auto-format URLs that are in the BODY of your article.
  4. Your links may NOT contain a file to be downloaded of any type.
  5. 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.
  6. We do not accept articles that have the same ACTIVE link more than once. Do not submit duplicate identical URLs.
  7. 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. If you put all 3 of the active self serving links that we allow in the body of your article, we will reject it. 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 an anchored text link. The goal with this policy is to be a good netcitizen by only allowing articles that add value with the anchored text links rather than for pure SEO reasons.
     

     Example: Within your article, you link the word "moon drawings" to an article that you wrote about making drawing of features on the moon. This is a good example of an anchored text link vs. linking the same text to your home page (which is much more generic) as it doesn't really add value.

  8. We will not accept articles with links (in the Article Body or Resource Box) to adult-oriented websites, including but not limited to websites that include pornography, adult-oriented sexual content.
  
  
• EMAIL 'MAILTO:' LINKS: We highly recommend including a link to your website but do not advocate including a mailto: or email link to your personal or work email account. Spammers will abuse it. It's better to include a valid website URL and let potential customers find your email address on your website.
  
  
• ADDING KEYWORDS: Adding the top keywords related to your article helps us to bring more traffic to your article.
  
  
  1. Please make sure you put a comma between each KEYWORD.
  2. Ideally, your keywords should be optimized based on the most commonly searched keywords as published by Overture.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 4-5 keywords and a maximum of 25.
  4. We do not accept keywords that are completely unrelated to the content of your article.
  
  
• ARTICLE SUMMARY: Every article must have a 2-5 sentence article summary. The purpose of the ARTICLE SUMMARY is to give an abstract or summary of the benefits that your article delivers.
  
  
  1. If you don't know what to put in your summary, just use the first paragraph of your article.
  2. We do not allow HTML tags of any kind in your ARTICLE SUMMARY.
  3. We do not allow blatant self-promotion in your ARTICLE SUMMARY.
  4. We do not allow your AUTHOR NAME to be in your ARTICLE SUMMARY.
  5. We do not allow any website URL or Email Address to be in your ARTICLE SUMMARY.
  
  
• 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:
  
  
  1. Astrophotography articles are only allowed in the Astrophotography category. We do not want to see astrophotography articles in the Equipment category or sub-categories.
  
  

Editorial Guidelines for Free and Re-Printable Content
ScoopQuest Article Directory is a free content article directory. This means that as a publisher you may re-print the article(s) that are posted in the ScoopQuest Article Directory database subject to the terms and conditions that generally apply to free content articles. The most common of these are:

1. Articles must be published "as is" (unedited).

2. Articles must be published with the author's bio paragraph (resource box) and copyright information included.

3. URLs in the resource box should be set as hyperlinks.

4. Whenever possible, authors should be notified of intent to publish.

5. Articles cannot be used in spam communications.

6. Use of Site Scrapers, Article Crawlers, or other automated methods/scripts to mine the article content of ScoopQuest Article Directory are expressly forbidden unless permission has been specifically granted by Night Sky Observer. If unauthorized requests are detected access to articles will be blocked.

We encourage publishers to use ScoopQuest Article Directory as a free content resource. However, if you use the content we provide on a regular basis, a link to our site would be appreciated.

Copyright and Violations
ScoopQuest Article Directory's policy prohibits the use of copyrighted material in a manner that violates the copyright owner's rights. In general, this means that publishers are required to use article content obtained from ScoopQuest Article Directory without change or modification.

Publishers should be aware that there is significant exposure if they are found to be in violation of copyright laws. Publishers who violate copyright law are legally liable and subject to possible fines.

Disclaimer
The articles on this Web site are provided for information purposes only and for redistribution as outlined in our guidelines. ScoopQuest Article Directory does not accept any responsibility or liability for the use or misuse of the article content on this site or reliance by any person on the site's contents.