We pride ourselves on providing our community with timely, high quality and valuable content from some of the best minds in the industry.  To maintain these standards we ask our contributors to adhere to the following guidelines:

Article Sumission Guidelines:

1. All posts must be at least 500-1500 words and may contain relevant images, videos, and outbound links that improve the overall experience of our community. Irrelevant hyperlinks will be removed and submissions containing keyword stuffing will be rejected. Note: All links must naturally fit into the sentence/article and provide value to the reader. Posts may not contain affiliate links.

2. Posts may not be promotional or advertorial. We do not publish company-specific news, press releases, or content reading similarly to a press release. Contributors are welcome to include a relevant CTA at the end of their posts. This may be either image- or text-based (1-2 sentences).

What counts as an acceptable CTA: 

• A download for some sort of content resource (guide, report, white paper, eBook, etc.)
• Registration for an event (webinar or live event)
• A free demo (must link to signup page)

What does not count as an acceptable CTA: 

• A call to visit a company website
• A call to follow the company on social media, including social profile links
• A call to subscribe to email newsletters and other related subscriptions
• A call to contact a company, including all forms of contact information

3. Author bios for individual contributors must be placed in the user profile and may not be included within the text of the post itself. If multiple authors wrote the post, it will be published under one name and the other authors’ names may be included in a by-line at the bottom (no bio information or links may be included).  Example: “John Smith and Sam Miller also contributed to this post.”

4. Given the large volume of posts that we receive daily, we ask that your posts please be in a ready-to-publish state consistent with our existing content when you submit them for final review. While we review each post and may adjust formatting as needed, posts requiring heavy editing may be rejected.

5. Authors submitting posts manually are responsible for checking the status of their posts to see if there are any edits required, as well as for making those edits and resubmitting the posts. Please note that when edits are needed on any submission to make them meet our guidelines, it will take longer for those posts to publish.

6. All contributors are responsible for the originality and accuracy of their submissions. Any contributor found to be plagiarizing any percentage of his or her content will be subject to an investigation of his or her entire body of work. If found guilty of plagiarism, the offending author will be banned from the community with all content removed.

What counts as plagiarism (this list is not exhaustive): 

• Copying another person’s work and submitting it as your own, word-for-word.
• Copying another person’s work and changing some words or phrases.
• Copying any part of another person’s work, whether changing words or not.
• “Spinning” another person’s work.
• Using another person’s idea as your own, including the progression, flow, and main points of a post, examples, images, etc.
• Copying content from any website, whether an author is given or not.

7. Content should be relevant to our site and audience.

8. Quotes should serve a purpose within the post and not be used simply to get a link back to a company page. We will ask for thin quotes and their accompanying links to be removed.

9. We syndicate content published on Complete Herbal Guide to third parties such as Yahoo! News, Bing News, and Google News. Please proofread and edit your posts carefully before submitting, as they syndicate the version originally published on our site. We cannot edit or remove posts once they are live, and we do not have the ability to edit or remove posts syndicated to external sites. If repeated requests are made, your contributor status may be reviewed.

10. Please allow one week for posts to go live. All post-publication & editing is done at the discretion of  TheComplete Herbal Guide Community.

Linking Guidelines:

1. No more than 3 links should point back to any domain. While lots of internal links make sense on your site, on ours, they can come across as being spammy.

Acceptable links:

• Relevant articles and blog posts
• Research or data
• Resources that will genuinely benefit the reader and make sense in the context of the post

Unacceptable links:

• Affiliate links
• One’s own company links (homepage, About Us, Contact, Prices, Products, etc.)
• Product/service/pricing pages
• Category/tag pages
• Company social profile links — please place these in your profile instead.

2. No link building. If we believe that you are contributing content for the sole purpose of building links for yourself or others, we will either ask for such links to be removed or simply not publish the post.

3. Please do not use repeat links or repeat keywords/anchor text.

4. No keyword-rich linking.

5. We reserve the right to remove or nofollow any link at our discretion.

If you are submitting a post in which any link must be included, it is likely not going to be a good fit for us, as that would constitute as sponsored content. Please be prepared for any included link to be removed.

Guidelines for Infographic Submissions

1. Must also include at least 300 words of original text. This text should be a substantial post in and of itself, providing useful information. It should not simply restate or summarize what is in the infographic. We expect this content to be as well written as a normal full-length blog post. If an infographic post contains thin text, regardless of how good the image is, it will be rejected.

2. An Infographic topic must be relevant to our core site themes. Irrelevant infographics will be rejected.

3. Infographic posts should include a link back to the original image source page, not a company homepage. The infographic itself should not be linked; rather, the link to the original source page should appear below the infographic.

4. The image itself should be high quality and full of relevant, useful information.

Quick Tips for Manual Submissions

1. If you need to leave a draft and come back to it, *do not add a title* — otherwise, it might be accidentally published prematurely. Add the title when you submit it. (Be sure to click “submit” when it’s ready!)

2. If the post was originally published elsewhere, please include a line at the very end that links back to the original. Please note: If you are planning on contributing a decent amount of content that was originally published on your blog, we may ask you to set up syndication in order to streamline the submission process.  

3. Please carefully double-check everything prior to submitting the post.

Please note: Submitting a post does not guarantee that the post will be published. Should your post not be published, please see the editing notes for opportunities to correct and resubmit, and review our terms of use.

These guidelines are subject to change at any time. Contributors are responsible for making themselves aware of changes and adhering to them.

Disclaimer: Your request to create a contributor account constitutes an agreement to these posting guidelines. Failure to follow these guidelines may result in your contributor access being revoked.