A little peeved.

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   tangoshoesposted 12 years ago

   So today I got a hub flagged as overly promotional. The warning said it contained too many affiliate links. The crazy thing about this is that I do have hubs which contain affiliate links but I happend to make this hub for a friend. She runs an art studio in AZ and she started a blog to help her customers sell their jewelry. This lady hasn't a clue what affiliate marketing even is. I think she has one affiliate text link to godaddy on one post but other than that no ads and she isn't trying to sell anything! Simply free information! I'm confused as to why hubpages would think it's an affiliate site. The only thing I can think of is she has a mailing list form in the sidebar.... I actually subscribe to this list and all it sends out is blog update notices. Ughhhhhaewwee so frustrating!

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      wildernessposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Which one is the hub that is flagged?  Just the title, no url?

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         tangoshoesposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         The title is: Sell Handcrafted Jewelry - Business Blog Review
         I think the title sounds promotional but they specifically said there was too many affiliate links or too many links pointing to a promotional sales page. I know there is a small group of popular affiliate products in the the "sell your handy crafts" type nice but this is actually honest, good, free, information that an expert is giving away. In fact I suggested to her that she write her own affiliate book and she said that she wanted to give the information away to her customers to promote her classes but that she had actually purchased some of these books and was highly disappointed with their content and that is why she isn't trying to pawn them off to her customers and is instead taking time out of her own day to write these really great blog posts for free.
         
         Well even if they never publish it maybe I'll finally get my forum badge since this is the first time I've had a chance to use it looking at the bright side!

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   QuestionMasterposted 12 years ago

   Hubpages staff have previously stated that even sites with mailing lists may be considered affiliates. Yes, silly I know. I guess it's because some people use mailing lists to send out paid offers.
   
   You could contact the team directly for a manual review: http://hubpages.com/contact_us/

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      tangoshoesposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks for the info. I just edited it. I was going over the number of links because of an RSS feed. I'll see if they accept it. If not I'll try contacting them. Honestly if your site contains good information I can't see why hubpages would care if you had a mailing list. It's unfortunate that some people abuse them but most go through easily unsubscribable mailing list companies such as aweber or icontact. I dunno I guess I just hope it gets published. I would have liked to use the RSS feature though

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         Jerrico Usherposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         You know a way around this that would likely be even helpful is to turn your hub into a hub series. In other words, set it up so your information is spread across two hubs. Add more information on the various pages your wanting to link to. If it were me I'd make a hub about each one, 400 words or so discussing each page. If the pages are similar bring it down to consolidation within reason for how many links they allow. This way your doing everyone a favor-
         
         1. Your helping your hub earnings with more hubs, more ads, more impressions for the page/traffic.
         
         2. Your helping hubpages in the same way as they get 40% of those impressions
         
         3. Your able to stay within the framework of the allowed per hub link tally
         
         4. Your friends site gets more interest, you get more information out about her studio/site, and people will likely if interested view each of those hubs thus the same result. More hubs means higher hub author score too, and overall it's a better strategy than trying to squeeze everything into one hub.
         
         5. You'll feel better, not feel short changed by having to remove links- and your within the rules.
         
         What I do within my series is create a text capsule at the top and bottom of each one. I open each hub in a separate tab, you can work on several simultaneously and even save them simultaneously.
         
         I then in the text capsule (using bullet point and quote buttons to center the text) I put a link to the last hub and at the bottom the next hub in the series. If you go to my hub account and look at the list of last published hubs you'll see the series I did on smart drugs- see how I formatted that? That was a single hub before I broke it into 7 parts, and in doing that I ended up editing it to make it fit into more capsules, that lead me to write more that I forgot to add, and thus made 2 extra hubs beyond the 5 I originally was going to break this into.
         
         Hope this helps Tango

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   GmaGoldieposted 12 years ago

   Fantastic information. I was considering a mailing list for one of my websites. I will have to review more closely.
   
   Thanks so much for sharing. I am learning and need all the tidbits that I can find.
   
   Thank you!

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   PaulGoodman67posted 12 years ago

   Could it be that you've used more than 2 links to her site in your hub?  I know that's a simple error, but it's one that I make and I get flagged for "over-promotional".

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      QuestionMasterposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      The warning specifically mentioned affiliates.

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      tangoshoesposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      I had one link in the body of the text and an RSS feed showing two posts. I had to remove it. It was counting each post in the RSS feed as a link to her site. I added another link so that I had two going to her blog and one going to her studio site ... her studio site is obviously a local business site. Still was rejected again. I cut it down to only text and only one link to her blog and one link to her local business site. We'll see if that makes it but if it was the two link rule they were worried about they should have accepted the last edit. *sigh* Hundreds of sites have forms in their template but if I was say linking to a big brand name site they wouldn't say anything about it. Just another way to kill small/local business owners when they try to get their hand on some of the big guys money.

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         wildernessposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         I counted two text links and an RSS feed to sellmyartjewelry.com which is a problem (the cached version).  Given that you have the RSS feed you cannot have links to the same site in the body of text.
         
         However, you also indicate that it is affiliate links that are the problem - is it possible that HP is counting each of these links as affiliate links?

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            tangoshoesposted 12 years agoin reply to this

            I have edited and been rejected twice now. I removed the RSS feed the first time around. That would have been only 2 links to sellmyartjewelry.com and one to the studio creativeuaz.com. That was rejected. For the second edit I removed the text link to sellmyartjewelry.com. and brought back the link box. This makes it one link to creativeuaz.com and one to sellmyartjewelry.com. neither are redirects or affiliate links. Sellmyartjewelry.com has one affiliate link on the whole site which is a small text link in the body of a post to godaddy.com. I guess I'll have to submit for the manual review.... or maybe... add more content? I'm just frustrated at this point.

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   homesteadboundposted 12 years ago

   I was having problems with a link whose domain name was from godaddy. The website had been built on tripod, and then was directed to the domain name. Hubpages doesn't like a link that is rerouted. Once I started using the tripod address where the website was created, I no longer had the problem. This might be something to check into.

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      tangoshoesposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      No there isn't any redirects going on. Its a simple wordpress blog. Her local business site is run on Jumla content management system. Her local business site does have information on classes at her studio and takes reservations online so I guess that site does sell something but it isn't affiliate in any way. Are we no longer a loud to link to sites that sell something? lol that would be nuts! What site isn't selling something? even ad space!

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