Are you a travel blogger?
If you are, I'd like you to know how happy I am every time I open my inbox and see another group email that refers to me as "Dear SEO Specialist", before nakedly touting for paid post opportunities. How times have changed.
I'm happy to see that you're no longer swimming in money gained for doing nothing - whether it's because of Penguin or because the cost of "working with you" finally got so high your market could no longer bear it and buckled underneath you (or some combination of the two) I'm not too sure, but to see the same people who spent the last 3 years flying around the world on dollars made from doing nothing to contribute meaningfully to the world suddenly begging ME for money is, frankly, hilarious. Travel blogging used to be a great way of sharing your travelling experiences, but recently it has seemed to turn into a way of funding the jollies of over-privileged turds all across the world (I swear blind, I have seen travel bloggers send people flight details and request plane tickets in exchange for posting a guest post), and I know several linkbuilders who were sick of dealing with bloggers who knew that what they were doing was a little exploitative. What goes around, comes around.
But then, have we actually just gone back to how things used to be?
I'm quite strongly of the opinion that SEOs created the travel blogger problem themselves, as agencies and in-house teams with ever bigger budgets and bottom rung linkbuilders with ever bigger link targets threw more and more money at blog owners, knowing that an in-content link on a regularly updated blog could make all the difference in the SERPs, and when someone else was footing the bill they were pretty easy to get.
So, what did we do? We sent email after email, offering (in most cases at least) pretty crappy copy in exchange for a ludicrous amount of money - and you guys took it and you lapped it up - as well you might. Gotta make hay while the sun shines, and that.
After all, in my first week of linkbuilding (about 5 years ago) I spent over a grand of company money on crappy sitewide links that nowadays you couldn't pay me to place on a blog; that's how things were back then (and anyone who tells you they weren't doing that is either a liar or was still too busy spamming blog comments and forums to notice), and people all over the world realised all of a sudden that their travel blog was no longer simply a result of their travelling - it could, in fact, become the thing that sent them all over the world.
But the sun has stopped shining, and all of a sudden your blog, full of nothing but guest posts and "sorry I haven't blogged for so long!" platitudes simply won't do any more. SEOs want engagement; we want authoritative partners who are part of a community as well as an expert in their fields (in truth, the good ones amongst us have wanted this for a long time, but guest posts were a lot easier to set up) - and you guys simply aren't.
I'm not going to name names (because I could), but I now get three or four mail-merged begging emails from travel bloggers every week, and I have to say that the mail merging often isn't done very well. There's no name used, there's placeholder text all over the shop, and it's not unusual for me to get multiple emails from one blogger in one batch. Bad form.
...But again, when I think about it, I know what the inbox of a fairly successful blogger looks like. They're often full of emails from agencies and PR companies, trying to spaff links into posts by offering anything from free products to cold, hard cash - often with wrong names in the opening line, mail merge errors (unless a lot of bloggers are called "bloggername1"), so we're hardly paragons of great behaviour.
So far as I can see, it's a cycle. As much as both parties don't like to admit it, we need each other - and all that changes is who is on the back foot. True, at the moment SEOs want to work with great bloggers who work hard to create fantastic, well-read blogs awash with comments and social bookmarks - but sooner or later some nefarious black-hat naughty types will find a way of automating those signals, and then the world will flip on its axis again, and the bloggers will be able to dictate terms once more - until the next major algorithm update, of course.
