Infobarrel Not Exactly Quality Control

1. 95

   beagrieposted 10 months ago

   I've recently read quite a bit about Infobarrel (in hindsight, I don't know how recent what I read was) being pretty good. I've been having a great time and some good success here so I thought I'd check it out. I wrote an 1100 word piece, completely original, with a YouTube video and a picture I took myself.
   
   I got a message barely a minute after clicking submit it for review saying it had been denied on the grounds of having a self-serving link (I had linked to a related article I wrote here on Hubpages). Now, I thought the link was perfectly contextual and added value for the reader. I would understand if Infobarrel just said they didn't want links to competitors or something, but they don't.
   
   But whatever, tomato/tomatoe. I removed the link and edited the text so it still made sense, and resubmitted. Then I realised there was an email waiting for me with a bit more information. It read;
   
   "Reason for denial:
   Article has a call to action requesting the visitor leave the site to visit your self-serving links. In the article body we only allow contextual links to self-serving links. If you want to suggest that a user visits one of your sites, please do so only in your signature. --- Article does not meet the quality standards of InfoBarrel. You are receiving for one of the following reasons: - Articles with very thin content created to generate back links - Articles that do not provide value to the reader and are geared towards capturing search traffic. - Articles that use bad grammar or poorly structured English Low quality articles are also against Google's terms of service as you can see here ([[link]]) under the Doorway Pages section. --- Article has been denied because it was written with the sole intention of trying to build links. Links within content are fine, however, awkwardly wording an article to generate your ideal SEO link anchor is not permitted, nor are you allowed to link to the same self-serving domain more than once."
   
   So in around a minute, Infobarrel was able to determine that my 1100 word article, which I wrote to the same standard as my 57 featured hubs, was low in quality, thin in content, and has no value to the reader?
   
   I'll see what they say about the resubmit but I suspect I'll be sticking solely to Hubpages in the future.

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   1. 97

      Jean Bakulaposted 10 months agoin reply to this

      Infobarrel is pretty dead. About 5 years ago I wrote the required 10 pieces to be accepted on the site as a writer. I never made a penny. When I tried to close my A/C, a person from the administration had a very public argument with me, when my pleas to close the A/C went unanswered for months. She kept attacking me on my Google + account.
      
      This was about 2 yrs. ago. At that time, all the posts were years old, and so was much of the material. The articles were not of the quality we have here at Hubpages. I wouldn't waste my time there. Basically there were a handful of people who were writing all the stuff anyway. It was very difficult to any answers to questions. I didn't even think they existed anymore.
      
      Why don't you move your best pieces here?

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2. 95

   beagrieposted 10 months ago

   UPDATE:
   
   Just after posting this forum post the article was approved. Given the time frames involved, I'm convinced it was initially denied and marked as low quality automatically because of the link, and I'm dubious anyone has taken a proper look at it in the 5 minutes since I resubmitted.

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3. 96

   Wesman Todd Shawposted 10 months ago

   Infobarrel used to be a very worthy competitor to Hubpages. It was always much much smaller. I've got more than a hundred pages there. Some of them used to get decent traffic. The owners have half abandoned Infobarrel for other projects. Which is something I'm still pretty sad about, but in any event, yeah - you're better off just concentrating on working here or on your own website.

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4. 82

   psycheskinnerposted 10 months ago

   I would agree that Infobarrel is basically abandoned at this point--which given that contributors don't have direct access to functions like deleting their work--is a deal killer for me.

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5. 88

   lobobrandonposted 10 months ago

   I would stick to HP and maybe your own sites and not Infobarrel.

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6. 98

   Gregory DeVictorposted 10 months ago

   I published some articles at InfoBarrel before I discovered HubPages. Professionally, I believe that HubPages is by far a much better option.

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7. 96

   Wesman Todd Shawposted 10 months ago

   Their minimum payout is fifty bucks. Same as here, and also, they pay into Paypal. Last December, unexpectedly, I received fifty something in payout from them. So I thought to myself, 'hey, well, maybe I should do some more work over there.' And I did. It's been nearly a year. I'm not even half way to payout again.

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8. 96

   Marisa Wrightposted 10 months ago

   You may have noticed that HubPages is a suite of vertical sites, each one specialising in a broad subject area.  There's a good reason for that.
   
   Google decided, a few years ago, that it HATED generalist sites written by multiple authors, unless they're news sites.  Google now goes to some lengths to penalise such sites.  No matter how good your article is, it's always handicapped if it's on a generalist site - the same article would rank higher if it was on a specialist site. 
   
   HubPages recognised that fact, and that's why they undertook the huge effort of splitting the main HubPages site up into specialist niches. Any site that hasn't done that, is probably doing badly already and is ultimately doomed.  Infobarrel is in that category.

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