Who decides what gets published here
This site takes money from sponsors and from affiliate links, and it also tells readers which tools to skip. Those two things only coexist if the rules are written down and hold when a deal is on the table.
This page is those rules: what a sponsor buys, what nobody can buy, how a page gets commissioned and retired, and what happens when we get something wrong.
Last updated
Sales and editorial are separated, and here is exactly where the line is
Most publishers in this category say their advertising is separate from their editorial and then leave the reader to guess what that means in practice. The useful version of that promise is a list of what changes hands, so this is ours.
Every commercial arrangement we accept fits in one sentence: a sponsor buys a labelled slot and our attention, and never a word in a guide they are not named in. When those two things pull against each other, the guide wins, because a comparison nobody trusts is worth nothing to sell against next quarter.
A clearly labelled placement, a link that carries rel="sponsored", and our time writing it well. Nothing else is for sale.
A position in a comparison guide, the removal of a criticism, a rating, or a link from an existing editorial page into their own.
The same editorial standard signs off both. A sponsored page that would embarrass us as an editorial page does not run, and we have turned work down on that basis.
Sponsored pages carry a label above the fold, not a line in the footer. Affiliate links carry rel="sponsored" whether or not the page mentions them.
How a page gets commissioned, checked, and retired
A page here is not finished when it is published. Pricing in the SEO-tool market moves several times a year, plan limits get quietly cut, and a guide written against last year's free tier misleads a reader who trusts it. So the interesting part of an editorial policy is not the writing standard, it is what happens in month nine.
Our answer is a fixed re-read cycle on the pages most likely to rot, and a refusal to re-date anything we have not actually re-checked. If the date on a page moved, something on that page moved with it.
- Commissioned
- A page runs when there is a question a reader is actually asking and we have a defensible source for the answer. Search volume alone is not a reason.
- Sourced
- Every figure gets a source and the month it was checked. Where the source is a vendor's own documentation, we say so rather than implying a test.
- Reviewed
- Tool pages are re-read on a 90-day cycle because pricing in this category moves. The dateModified on the page is the real date it was last touched.
- Retired
- A page that can no longer be kept accurate is rewritten or removed, not left up with a fresh date on stale numbers.
Corrections, in public and dated
Getting something wrong is not the failure; leaving it wrong is. A correction is made on the page that carried the error, the modified date changes, and a material correction, meaning one that changes the advice rather than the spelling, carries a short note saying what changed.
Readers and vendors both use the same route for this: the contact form, pointing at the claim and the source. We check the vendor's live documentation before changing a figure, because a support-desk email is not a published price.
What we will not do is quietly edit a claim out of a page and leave the impression it never ran. The whole reason to publish a standard is that it costs something when you follow it. The two longest pages on the site are the fairest test of it: our longest build guide and passive income ideas.
What this policy binds
- Every page on this domain, sponsored placements included.
- Every outbound commercial link, disclosed on the page that carries it.
- Contributor posts accepted through our write-for-us route, which are edited to this standard or declined.
- Our research method, which sets out the sources behind the figures.
- Point at the claim
- Send the page URL and the sentence. A correction we cannot locate is a correction we cannot make.
- Name the source
- Vendor documentation, a government page, or a dated screenshot. We re-check it ourselves before anything moves.
- What happens next
- The page is corrected, its modified date changes, and a material change carries a note saying what changed.
Twenty-five of forty-seven pages were absent from the site plan
A documented first-hand account, not a market pattern. node scripts/validate-blueprint.mjs against research/site-blueprint.csv and the 47 routes in dist/, on 2026-09-05.
A quality process that skips half the site is worse than none, because its green result reads as coverage. The blueprint behind this site covered 23 rows against 47 built routes: the sixteen tool reviews sat behind a single wildcard row and nine utility and hub routes had no row at all.
Every instrument that resolves a page's tier from that file was therefore grading barely half of what was published. The rows exist now, one per route, which is why the checks on this page can be stated as covering the whole site.
What this does not say: Specific to how this project recorded its plan; the general lesson is about coverage gaps, not about any particular file format.
SideIncomeHQ sitemap index (2026-09-05) ยท SideIncomeHQ editorial policy (2026-09-05)
Forty-eight published pages carried no citation list
A documented first-hand account, not a market pattern. node scripts/check-references.mjs --blocks over dist/ on 2026-09-05, before and after src/data/sources.json was created.
Before this pass, the site cited primary sources inside its sentences and had no citation registry and no end-of-page sources block on any of its 48 pages. A reader could follow a link but could not see the set of sources a page rested on.
That is the difference between a page containing links and a page whose evidence can be audited, and it stays invisible until somebody counts. Every page now ends with its sources and the date each was read.
What this does not say: Observed on this site; other sites solve the same problem in other ways, and a Sources block is not the only acceptable answer.
SideIncomeHQ editorial policy (2026-09-05)
Sixteen review pages had a house voice and no outside voice
A documented first-hand account, not a market pattern. node scripts/check-quotes.mjs over dist/ on 2026-09-05 found expert quotes on 0 of 48 pages before the assignment pass and on 48 after.
Every tool review on this site carried pull quotes written in-house and not one cited outside opinion - while a bank of 93 sourced, attributed quotes already sat in the project, unused.
A review that only quotes itself reads as confident and proves nothing. The material to fix that usually already exists somewhere in the research, which is the more useful half of the observation: this was a wiring failure, not a shortage of evidence.
What this does not say: One site s editorial history. Whether an outside quote improves a specific page is a judgement, not a measurement.
SideIncomeHQ tool reviews index (2026-09-05)
A verified local build is not a shipped page
A documented first-hand account, not a market pattern. Compared the repository HEAD against the build id served by the live site on 2026-09-05, and against the deploy log in logs/actions.md.
Two commits on this project passed every local check and then sat undeployed for nine days, because this host takes a direct upload rather than building from the repository. The pages readers were served were an older build for that whole period.
"It is fixed" and "a reader can see it" are different claims. The gap between them is where a good deal of published advice quietly stops being true, and the only defence is to verify the deployed build rather than the local one.
What this does not say: Specific to this hosting setup; other pipelines deploy on push and cannot produce this particular gap.
SideIncomeHQ methodology (2026-09-05)
Editorial policy questions
Who writes the pages on this site?
Can a company pay to be recommended?
What happens when you publish something wrong?
How often is a page updated?
Do you use AI to write these pages?
How do you handle a conflict of interest?
Can I ask for a correction or a right of reply?
Want your tool or offer in front of this audience?
We take a small number of sponsored posts and advertising placements each month, every one of them labelled. Tell us what you are promoting and we reply within two business days with rates and the next open slot. Everything we publish sits on SideIncomeHQ, and the archive is open before you decide.
Rates and formats come back with the reply. Every placement is labelled.