We welcome many different types of website and blogs at OurLocality.Org. Take a look at these examples of categories we are cool with:
- Personal: This is the broadest category and includes blogs and websites about personal topics from Music and Family, to Travel and Health, Sports and Pastimes, How-to, Tips and Reviews.
- Business: Professionals that wish to share their expertise and small companies that want to develop a web presence or to engage with their customers.
- Schools: For parents and teachers and students to connect and much more (Nota Bene in East Lothian please head over to our good friends at Edubuzz.org first – for they have a similar arrangement that will probably meet your needs better.)
- Not-for-profit: Foundations, charities, and community groups should find our tools poised to help you raise awareness of your good cause.
- Politics: Activists can use our platform to reach out and connect with their constituencies.
- Private: Make it private to share information with selected users, but see below.
Blogs that violate our advertising policy or fall into one of the following categories are not allowed:
- Scraper sites: Blogs that take content from other blogs and re-publish it without permission (this is sometimes called scraping). If a blog contains stolen content, it’s gonna go!
- SEO sites: Blogs that are written for search engines instead of humans. These blogs are dedicated to trying to fool Google and other search engines into ranking them or the sites they link to highly. OurLocality is not meant for this type of activity.
- Affiliate marketing sites: Blogs with the primary purpose of driving traffic to affiliate programs and get-rich-quick schemes (“Make six figures from home!!”, “20 easy steps to top profits!!”, etc). This includes multi-level marketing (MLM) blogs and pyramid schemes. To be clear, people writing their own original book, movie or game reviews and linking them to Amazon, or people linking to their own products on Etsy do NOT fall into this category. Here is a thread in the WordPress support forums that talks more about which affiliate links are likely to be OK or those that are not OK.
- Warez sites: Blogs that promote pirated copies of ebooks, software packages, music, movies, games, etc.
- Automated sites: Blogs that are generated by computers, including randomly generated blogs, blogs that re-publish press releases, marketing material, search engine results, link dumps or any other mass-produced content.
- Mature sites: Do we need to elaborate? This isn’t out of any sort of prudishness, simply that the platform is intended to be family-friendly.
If you find a blog that violates our rules please report it.
Photos and videos. Your allowance on the free package is modest and set quite low, so don’t go overboard. There are fantastic photo and video sharing sites that can be integrated relatively easily with our software. They have serious amounts of money and can offer you terabytes of space for next to nothing. The good thing is that you will also think about keeping the quality of your images high and the number low.
If you have feedback or questions, please contact ourlocality@ourlocality.org.