Resource Links Policy Submittal and Posting Guidelines
Our primary purpose and goal for our resource pages is to provide useful, well organized, and fairly unique information for our readers in a concise and easily navigational format that emphasizes quality over quantity. Each link should provide our readers with educational material that will aid and mature Christians in their walk with Christ, introduce others to Christ, equip our readers to successfully navigate through this fallen world, and/or positively influence our culture and society. Other links to material that would be of valuable interest to our readers may also be considered.
We give preference to ministries, charities, non-profits, and organizations who hold to biblical and traditional values. We generally tend to avoid most Content Marketing pages/sites. With these goals in mind, we've developed the following guidelines for evaluating submitted links.
General Guidelines
To be considered:
Sites/Pages must make the privacy and security of visitor information a top priority.
Pages should be fairly clean with minimal ads, third party cookies, pop-ups and trackers, and no keystroke capturing.
Articles and posts should be written by a reputable author or organization.
Articles should contain high quality content and be fairly unique (not mass produced elsewhere, or similar to dozens, hundreds or even thousands of other articles easily found on search engines).
Subjects of the page must be consistent with our standard topics. If there is sufficient interest and available time, we’ll create additional pages for related topics.
Pages containing links to other articles are acceptable, but the links should add good information rather than just be included for link building or promotion of a product or service.
Pages containing sponsored links must be clearly identified as such.
Sites/Pages must have a clearly identified “Privacy Policy” that contains a detailed disclosure of all personal information (including web browsing history) that is collected from visitors, the purpose for collection, and how that information is used and shared with affiliates, associates, partners, or other third parties. This should also include any methods by which the visitor may be contacted by you and/or others such as mail, phone, text messages, email etc. It must also contain detailed info/instruction on how to “opt-out” or manage personal data gathering. Links to your Privacy Policy must be prominently displayed, not hidden within your “About-Us”, “Terms of Use” or other pages.
We generally don't link to the following:
Content Marketing sights/pages such as “Product and/or Service Reviews”, “Locator and/or Referral Services”, “Infomercials”, “Buyers Guides”, other informational (sometimes sponsored) content that is used to promote a product or service, or to earn commissions and/or referral fees by driving viewer traffic to the sites of “Associates”, “Affiliates” etc (We occasionally make rare exceptions for some that contain unique high quality content, but generally approve less than 2% of these sights / pages - see additional requirements in the next section below)
Sites/Pages that openly promote anti-Christian, anti-family, or anti-traditional values (gambling etc)
Sites/Pages with non-family-friendly content (some essential PG material is acceptable for some categories)
Sites/Pages with excessive ads, pop-ups, trackers, and/or affiliate links
Sites/Pages with click-bait titles and other deceptive material or advertising
Sites/Pages that are overly self-promotional - that are basically advertisements for your product or services (exceptions made for ministries and charities)
Sites/Pages that require membership, sign-in, or personal info to read articles
Sites/Pages with mass-produced and/or spammy content with little value for our readers
Sites/Pages that directly or indirectly link to law firms soliciting class-action or mass tort plaintiffs
Sites/Pages offering services that are quite common - There is, of course, nothing wrong with offering a common valuable service (quite the opposite), but when we listed some of these in the past, we would be overwhelmed with so many similar requests that we could not list them all, and we don't want to play favorites.
Self-Test: If entering your title or subject into an internet search engine returns hundreds, thousands, or even millions of pages with similar content, your page is not likely to be approved.
Additional Requirements for Content Marketing and Affiliate Pages
Proper Advertising Disclaimers and Notices
The author of each article must disclose any relationship to all main or linked pages/sites (if any), such as owner, executive, marketing rep, employee, affiliate, ad agency representative, etc. In addition, all sites containing sponsored content that is used to earn commissions and/or referral fees by driving viewer traffic to the sites of “Associates”, “Affiliates” etc, must contain proper advertising, sponsor, and/or notices of commission or any other benefit to the referring site.
Very Important: These marketing and affiliate disclosures/disclaimers/notices etc must follow the guidelines of the Federal Trade Commission Online Advertising Disclosure Guidelines (see also the accompanying pdf and FAQs). We want to emphasis that the disclosures are required for sites receiving financial or any other type of benefit, and must be clear, noticeable, and easily discernible. This includes both links to affiliates and “natural” links to your own products and services. See the pdf for guidelines regarding the language and placement info on the disclosure, and for hyperlink requirements (locations, descriptive language etc) if the disclosure is located on an “about us”, “privacy policy” or similar page. A common infraction that we typically see involves the location of the disclaimer or hyperlink, and lack of meaningful text in the hyperlink.
If your site does not accept advertising or sponsorships, and is privately funded, please include a note to that effect with your submittal, so that we don't exclude you on the basis of missing disclosures.
Online Behavior Tracking and Data Collection
Behavior Tracking (aka behavior marketing or advertising, preference marketing, target advertising etc) is a type of online profiling and defined by the FTC as the “tracking of a consumer’s online activities over time – including the searches the consumer has conducted, the Web pages visited, and the content viewed – in order to deliver advertising targeted to the individual consumer’s interests”. All sites should have a prominently displayed and clearly worded disclosure noting whether or not they allow this tracking by the site or by third party sites. We will assume that all sites without a statement declaring otherwise to allow this behavior. In addition, a “clear, easy-to-use and accessible means” must be provided to allow users the option of opting out of having their data collected for the purposed of receiving targeted ads.
Data Collection Forms
All forms that collect any type of data from visitors must contain a clear and conspicuous disclaimer describing how all reader-entered data will be collected, stored, used and/or shared. The notice must be part of the form or adjacent to the form, not hidden away on a “privacy” or other page. For example, “By completing this form, you are giving us permission to contact you” (or “add you to our mailing list”, and/or “forward your info to our associates” etc).
The above guidelines are more complicated than we'd like, but our primary goal is to protect our readers while providing them with links to high quality pages and sites, without overwhelming them with a large number of links to pages/sites with similar and/or self-promoting content.
In addition, we attempt take the entire site into consideration when doing our review, not just the submitted page.
Please email us your link(s) for review.
The spam filter has been set very low for this particular email address so that all messages will pass through. Please don’t send five or six follow-ups emails over a two week period asking if we got your request (yes, this happens a lot). We love hearing from our readers, but we have many other projects going, so we don’t always have time to respond individually.
We hope to update the various resource pages at least once or twice a month as time allows, so please be patient.
Please include the word “Packers” in the “Subject Line” of your email.
Thanks very much for your contribution to our site.