Sponsored content policy

What may be sponsored

As this page is published, nothing on this site is sponsored. There is no advertising, no affiliate arrangement and no paid placement anywhere in the guide, and the pages you are reading were commissioned by nobody.

The policy exists anyway, because it is easier to write the rules before there is money on the table than after. If sponsorship ever appears here it will take one of two forms and no other: a clearly separated block that has no bearing on the surrounding text, or a page that is entirely sponsored and says so at the top. In both cases the sponsor pays for the space and never for the conclusion.

The guides themselves stay out of scope. No tier page, no gesture page and no recommendation inside one is available for purchase, and nobody may pay to be added to, removed from or moved within the ordering of the site.

Labelling

Any paid or exchanged content will be labelled in plain words at the top, before the text and not underneath it, saying that it is paid and by whom. We will not use language that hides it: no partner, no collaboration, no featured, no in association with, where the honest word is paid.

Commercial links, where they ever exist, will carry the technical attributes search engines expect for paid or affiliate links, and the label will be visible to a human reader as well, because a machine readable attribute alone does not inform anybody.

If we are ever given something rather than paid, a product to look at or a place at an event, that will be disclosed on the page in the same way. A gift is a payment for these purposes.

Refusals

• Anything sold to dog owners on the strength of this guide. Food, supplements, training devices and insurance are exactly what a site like this could sell and exactly what would make it untrustworthy.
• Links bought to move a page up a search engine. They are against search engine policy, they are useless to readers, and they are the most common request an independent guide receives.
• Payment to name a shelter, a charity or a rescue. This guide names none of them, and it will not start naming the ones that pay.
• Content written elsewhere and published under our name. Guest articles and syndicated placements are declined regardless of quality.
• Any arrangement that requires a page to be changed, softened or removed. This is the one that is refused even when nothing is paid.

Offers can be sent to contact@50ways.org, and they will be answered honestly, including a plain no. If the answer ever becomes yes, this page changes first and the label appears on the content itself; how we handle changes to our own rules is described in the editorial policy.