The publication
Sponsored Content and Paid Links
A rule written down in advance rather than a judgment made once an offer is on the table. Nothing paid for ever changes what a page says.
This page states, before anyone asks, what Marks & Blinds will and will not do commercially. It exists because the useful version of that answer is a rule written down in advance, not a judgment made case by case once an offer is on the table.
The rule that comes before the rest
A commercial arrangement never decides what a page says. The rulebook figures, the tables, the reading dates and the judgments are written first, from the documents, and they are not altered afterwards because somebody paid for a link on the same page. If an arrangement would require changing any of that, it is refused, and it is refused before the price is discussed.
The second rule follows from the first: no page is published whose purpose is to carry a link. Every page on this site exists because a reader has a question it answers. A page written around a destination is not an article with a link in it, it is an advertisement with paragraphs around it, and readers can tell.
What is accepted
A paid or exchanged link is accepted when three conditions hold at once. The destination belongs to the subject of the page it sits on, which for this publication means retriever work, training, equipment, waterfowl, breeds, health screening or the ground and seasons the work happens on. The page it sits on already exists, or would have been written anyway. And the link can be marked without making the sentence dishonest.
Editorial partnerships are considered on the same basis. A proposal that names the page here it has in mind, and the page it is proposing, and says why the two subjects genuinely meet, is a proposal that gets a real answer. One that arrives as a list of anchor texts does not.
What is refused
Rankings, scores or recommendations in exchange for payment. Any arrangement that touches a figure taken from a rulebook, or that asks for a claim to be softened, strengthened or removed. Pages written around a destination. Links to listings of animals for sale, to kennels, to litters or to anything offering a dog. Anything that would require this publication to name a person, publish a result or announce an event, since none of those is published here at all.
Anything outside the subject is refused as a matter of course, however well it pays. A reference site is worth exactly what its readers think it is worth, and a single out of place link costs more than it pays.
How anything sponsored is marked
Two markings are applied together, and neither is optional. The link itself carries the sponsored value in its relation attribute, which is the machine readable signal search engines ask for. And the page carries a visible statement, in the body where a reader will actually see it, saying that the link is part of a commercial arrangement.
The visible statement is the important half. A machine readable attribute satisfies a crawler; it does not tell a reader anything. Anyone reading a page here should be able to tell, without inspecting anything, which links are editorial and which are not.
Three further limits apply. No sponsored link appears in the header, the navigation, the footer or the standing rail, because a link that appears on every page is not part of any article. No page carries a wall of them. And an arrangement that ends means the link goes, rather than quietly staying because nobody remembered it.
What a reader can hold this to
If a link on this site is part of a commercial arrangement and is not marked, that is an error and it should be reported. Write to the desk, name the page and the link, and it will be either marked or removed, and the change will be noted with a date in notes and rule updates like any other correction.
The same applies to the harder version of the question. If a page here reads as though a figure or a judgment was written to suit a link, say so. That is the failure this whole policy exists to prevent, and the fastest way to find out whether it has happened is to have it pointed out by somebody who noticed.
Where to send a proposal
One address, the same as everything else: [email protected]. A useful proposal names the page on this site, names the destination, and says in one or two sentences why a reader of the first would want the second. Proposals that do not are not answered, and that is not rudeness, it is arithmetic.
The method that produces the pages a proposal would sit on is set out in sources and method. Who is responsible for what is published, and how a correction is made, is on the editorial policy, and what this site collects from a reader, which is nothing, is described on the privacy page.