Your article is read and approved or denied by a real human, and not automatically run through software. The human editors have a selection of reasons why a submission would be denied, and most likely, if your article is denied, you will get a canned denial response. It’s still a person who reads your submission and makes the determination.
The #1 Reason Why Your Article Hasn’t Been Approved Yet
Not submitting the article properly: Generally speaking, we try to proofread and approve articles within two hours. When following the submission procedures and changing your post’s status to “pending approval,” an email is sent to the editor alerting them that an article is in queue to be approved.
The problem at times is that writers sometimes set their posts as “drafts” and when that happens the editors aren’t alerted so they wouldn’t know that there’s a post ready to go live.
So, in short, if your post is ready to go live, just make sure you have it set to “pending approval.”
Common Article Denial problems
Non-contextual links: A call to action, such as “Click here to read . . .” or “Search the web for . . .” is not acceptable on The Urban Twist, even if the link leads to another article on The Urban Twist. It’s also not a good idea, for several reasons: first, the search engines won’t have a clue how that link is relevant to your article; second, readers may be reluctant to click on a link if they don’t know what it will take them to; and third, you will never rank for the phrase “Click here.” The hands-down winner for that anchor text goes to downloading the Adobe Acrobat reader!
The other possible denial reason for a non-contextual link is a link in the form of http://www.somewebsite.com. The Urban Twist rules require comprehensible anchor text. So weave your link into the text of your article. If you read this article you will see numerous examples.
Non-contextual links, but I don’t even have any links: The Urban Twist rules prohibit a text reference in which an entire website address is given. So “This item is available on Amazon” is acceptable. “This item is available on Amazon.com” is not. Just get rid of the .com and your article should be approved.
Link in the first paragraph: Even if you don’t have a hyperlink in the first paragraph, your article can be denied if you reference a web address, such as amazon.com, in the first paragraph. If you have short paragraphs, allow at least ten sentences before your first external link.
Not enough words: You pasted your article into the summary box.
Overly promotional: You are not presenting an impartial review of a website, product, or service, but instead promoting one like a sales document. If you write a review, make sure it is impartial. If you write about a single restaurant that gives out free food on Tuesdays, that is an advertisement. If you write about ten places to get free food in your town, that is an article that will meet The Urban Twist’s quality standards.
Awkward use of English: Without going into a full explanation, you have more than two grammatical or spelling errors in your article. If you keep getting denied with this reason, and you really can’t see your mistakes, it might be time to hire an editor.
Additional formatting: here are some of the most common reasons for denials in this category:
- Run-on sentences
- Comma splices
- Random capitalization Of words
- Failure to capitalize proper nouns
- failure to start sentences with a capital letter
- Paragraphs are not logical breaks
- One-sentence paragraphs
- Paragraphs that are too long
- Improper (or no) use of hyphens
- Improper use of apostrophes (for example, using an apostrophe when you meant a plural)
- No space or multiple spaces after periods
Title errors: Use title case for your titles. Make sure all the words in your title are spelled correctly and your grammar is perfect.
Self-serving links: any link that is not to a clearly neutral source, such as a government or educational site, is considered self-serving. Companies hire content writers all the time to promote their brands, and the staff at The Urban Twist have no way of determining whether you have a financial relationship with a company. So links to neutral sites will not count against you, but links to blogs, other articles, and websites for companies will.
Duplicate: Only original content that is unpublished elsewhere is allowed on The Urban Twist. Thus, an article can be original in that you wrote it, but it must not be published elsewhere on the web, either before or after you submit it here. If it is published elsewhere, it will be denied as a duplicate. Spinning an article to get it past the plagiarism checkers won’t work, because a human reads your article and can detect spinning, whereas software might not.
Excess whitespace: Go through your article and look for extra spaces or returns. Extra returns often show up in text elements, as when you go through and modify your text, the returns tend not to get deleted and show up at the end.
