Hotel metasearch site UpTake is embarking on what it claims is a web-first to aggregate not only travel information from suppliers but also bloggers around the world.
Known as Travel Gems, UpTake’s system will feed relevant content from travel bloggers against search results using pingback technology developed by the company.
The programme will launch in conjunction with Travel Channel website World Hum as its first content provider.
UpTake president Yen Lee says the system will benefit users by giving them access to relevant editorial and also bloggers through exposure to a wider audience.
Blog content featured on the Gems site includes the post title, blog name, a thumbnail image and a excerpt from the blog, allowing UpTake visitors determine if they want to click through to the actual blog.
Although the system is being marketed as a consumer-driven initiative, clearly UpTake will benefit enormously from the SEO value of the pingback system it has created for use by bloggers.
Writers can automatically alert the UpTake engine to a relevant post on their blog by including a dedicated link.
A screening system will be used to prevent inappropriate content finding its way to search results on the main UpTake site.
Lee says:
“Through Travel Gems, UpTake merges two social media communities, travel review sites and blogging to improve the online trip planning experience.
“Travel Gems extends our mission of aggregating the most useful travel information to help consumers decide upon a better trip.”
Last week Lee savaged search sites Google and Bing in a blog post following their appearance at the PhoCusWright@ITB event in Berlin, Germany.
A web-first? Sounds an aweful lot like the Blogsherpa program over at Lonely Planet namely (although they happily republish the entire entry!), and it’s virtually identical to Urbanspoon’s setup, although that isn’t really in travel of course. First or not, it’s a smart setup!
As long as the links back to the bloggers are all clean, this is a win-win for both (though if I had to put money on it, I’d say so far the win is bigger for the aggregator than for the blogger). From an idealistic point of view though, I do hope that Google and other search engines start giving more credit to the creator of the content over aggregators going forward. This is a trend that’s accelerating the development of a lot of non value add aggregators (and with that I’m not referring to Uptake!), and I doubt Google likes that trend. In the end, that might pose a risk to more value add aggregator setups like Uptake who get caught in the cross-fire. One need not look far to see the negative sentiment around something like Mahalo which is being waved in front of Google’s nose as an indicator that Google is failing at stopping spam. If there’s one lesson I’ve learnt through the years, it’s that Google doesn’t like looking like fools, so I doubt they are going to sit by idly
@sam – they used the phrase “is the first of its kind”, which is a bold statement and thus why i put the word “claims” in the piece.
It may be my phrasing, what’s new is the use of pingback technology to mix and match the posts to the right page on UpTake. It is true it will help our SEO, it will also help the blogger’s SEO, especially a new site that few people link to or know about it. I frequently read blog posts with beautiful writing with no audience. We hope this program brings that obscure bloggers’ writing to light and adds a fresh point of view for the UpTake site visitor. It is a program where all can win.
Who care who did it first, it is offering a great platform for travel Bloggers. It is great that they only offer a bite of the blog post, too. That helps the blogger because it drives traffic directly to their site. Readers have to click through the link to see the whole post.
You can see it on this page: (The Travel Gems are on the right rail and at the bottom)
http://www.uptake.com/california/san_francisco.html
I don’t really care who does what first, just not a big fan of that kind of marketing speak
One thing that bloggers should consider though, is that Google is very good at knowing what links on a page are part of the navigation/standard layout of a page (ie. usually auto-generated or automated in some other way) and which links are ‘real’ votes for the page they link to. The example above is a good example of a link to a bloggers post which Google is likely not going to pass much value through, whereas the link back is in the middle of a whole bunch of text, smack in the middle of the content area. That makes it much harder for Google to realize that that link isn’t *just* a vote for the page in question, and they are therefore far more likely to weigh the link to Uptake way higher than the link back, regardless of the PageRank involved.
I’m not saying it’s a bad deal for travel bloggers as I’m sure they will get more traffic back than vice versa, but the value of the link to Uptake, if it leads to even the slightest ranking increase for that term, is in the 1000′s of dollars per year.
Like I said in my last comment, this is a very smart setup
I understand your point about relative worth of incoming links, Sam. That’s true. However, an incoming link from a related site (i.e. travel-specific) is worth more in and of itself than a link from, say, a friend’s DIY crafts blog. I think this is an innovative turn by Uptake. I’ve participated in it already, and it’s just great.
It also is an added incentive to being part of “the Uptake family,” so to speak. For online writers, ROI is measured in other ways besides that monthly paycheck.
It’s worth noting that actual human people screen the incoming blog links to make sure the content is relevant to the Uptake post being linked. Nothing auto-generated about it.
I’m really interested to see how this plays out. The real winner in all of this could be the traveler, who gets the best of both worlds.
I have been pondering over whether to take part on the Uptake Travel Gems programme. Although I wasn’t sure of the technical reasons, I had the feeling that Uptake might benefit more from the links than Europe a la Carte.
It’s exciting to see more and more of this kind of merging and aggregating information!
Agree with Sam.
At least at first glance, appears a lot more upside for Uptake out of this than the bloggers. One of complaints leveled re BlogSherpa was the relatibely low traffic levels that came out of LP back to the blogger. But still, guess every bit of profiling helps for bloggers looking for new readers — even if they do have to link to Uptake to get it.
There are a few things happening here. Both parties — the blogger and Uptake — benefit from the SEO link juice that happens as part of this handshake.
The question that remains open in my mind is whether or not the blogger truly benefit with traffic. In my experience, generic links don’t deliver the kind of traffic I’d like to see as a result of that handshake. Now it could be that my writing sucks and I don’t deliver anything worth clicking back to read about, I’m open to that interpretation.
But in my experience, the real links that drive traffic are those that have been endorsed by credible humans. Uptake’s model feeds the Google Monster, but does it drive clicks? I don’t know.
I respond to personal endorsements for links I should click much more positively because they’re typically preceded by WHY I should click — because it’s funny/awesome/scary/maddening/etc…
The idea that the stories are coming from World Hum, now there’s a publication I trust and if I’m on the Uptake site and see a World Hum story, odds are good I’ll click. But if I’m on the site and see some post from Joe Blogger, well…
The benefits to Uptake are clear. The benefits to bloggers? SEO juice, sure, but will it drive READERS?
I participate in Uptake’s Travel Gems program and routinely receive traffic back from my posts that they highlight. If it helps me with Google fine, but I’m more interested in new readers being introduced to my blog.
Obviously, if I link a post for a popular destination to Uptake, I’m going to receive more traffic from them than from one of my off-the-beaten path articles. That’s true with any of the link-back programs such as LP or Raveable.
So here is the question for UpTake and also everyone else.
Put these three elements in what is the order of priority for launching Gems:
* SEO
* Blogger recognition
* User experience
Uptake’s order of priority for launching Gems
1 SEO
2 User experience
3 Blogger recognition
Uptake is a business so I would expect them to consider their own interests first, it for bloggers to evaluate if they wish to join.
a lot has been said already about the SEO perspective of this program – I will comment briefly – a couple of technical things to keep in mind, if a blogger links to an uptake page that has already accumulated a lot of links and authority over the years from their brand new blog post with no links of it’s own or accumulated authority – then the link from the authoritative page on UpTake (to the blog post) will have incredible value to that particular post. The value to UpTake is also clear as the UpTake page receives one more link – but keep in mind that normally an individual blog post would have no way of getting such a strong link from a page with lots of its own inbound links – and also an exact topical match. So I think this is a pretty unique opportunity from a linking perspective. and somewhat incorrect to presuppose that the value to UpTake page is greater than that of the value to the blogger – in many cases it is likely the other way round… of course that’s up to the blogger and what they choose to write about, and where they choose to link.
It is also important to note that while the easiest and most automated way to get included in this program is to find relevant pages and link to them, bloggers can send an email to feedback@uptake.com with all the relevant details and we will manually consider these for includsion as well (this takes a lot longer for us to process however, as there is no automation involved)
That said – the real win-win here is the new and unique match between the blogger (who ultimately is seeking an audience) and the UpTake website visitor who is seeking content on a very particular subject. For example an UpTake website visitor may be looking for “Attractions in Seattle” – And if a blogger is writing an article from their latest travels, on that very subject, they now have a unique (and may I add, incredibly easy) opportunity to get exposure on a popular travel site, but not just that, people who are literally looking for Seattle attractions at this very moment! The UpTake Web visitor gets to find travel stories that directly related to their current interest – which is something that they would normally never find at a site like UpTake.
I think that is the most exciting part!
I’me excited to finally see this launch. (disclosure: I’m an UpTake co-founder and former employee).
I think there is a strong win-win for both UpTake and the bloggers participating from an SEO standpoint and from a discoverability standpoint.
I think this is still just a first step toward making travel blog content more discoverable for consumers who are looking for unique insight. I’m certain that had I not been involved in UpTake’s blog efforts I would be clueless about travel blogs and the value that they can provide to travelers.
Maybe Sam Daams has all the traffic and readers he needs.
But I don’t think that’s true for all bloggers! He’s right that the effort is not purely altruistic and is a business building effort by UpTake. Well, I’ve always appreciated his cynical sense of humor and he’s right that if UpTake didn’t get anything out of it, the company wouldn’t have done it. Fair enough. But its still good for travel bloggers.
Ok, from an UpTake perspective (I work at UpTake and manage the program), it was user experience, blogger recognition and then SEO (but it had to work both ways). Integrating posts from a pure technical standpoint is challenging, finding bloggers with relevant information about a trip is time consuming as is digging out their contact information. By giving bloggers the ability to share their travel-related posts on a travel site by sending us the post link via email or by a link in the post and sharing those post with our readers, we streamline the process. We hope it creates a win for our site visitor, the blogger and ourselves. Our site gets many, many visitors on a daily basis. We hope to share that traffic.
The debate is interesting, of course, but the real fun will be in watching the traffic as Uptake.com executes this program for both its site and the linked bloggers.
*This is not a sponsored comment and yes I write for Uptake*
I really appreciate some of the comments by Sam and liked Elliot’s take eventhough he speaks as a former employee.
It seems like one of the main questions is what is the motive behind Uptake doing this. Is Uptake doing it to benefit their business and is this benefitting Uptake more than Travel Writers? Well does a dog pee on a fire hydrant?! Being a business in the current economy and especially a business in the travel industry, why would they do it if it was not significantly helping the company? Would I sell my writing to major travel magazine without the expectation of a byline and compensation (This hasn’t happened…yet) Of course it’s benefitting Uptake and I don’t know this for sure, but it’s probably benefitting them more than it’s benefitting travel writers. I’m making that assumption, but this is just business practices.
As far as whether it’s benefitting travel writers, I can say for one, that it is benefitting my travel website. My website is in it’s infancy, 8 weeks old, but I started using Uptake’s travel gems recently. 4 weeks ago my keywords were not appearing in search engines and I was getting no traffic from Uptake. Over the last couple weeks, I’ve been getting about 30% of my traffic from keywords in search engines and getting some visitors here and there from Uptake. Now was this due to the Travel Gems program? Well of course not solely, since I don’t depend on the Travel Gems program. Like businesses shouldn’t make Twitter and Facebook their sole marketing arm, I don’t do that for my website. I believe the travel gems program, in addition to other initiatives, has contributed to this increase in readership and search engine traffic. However, this I believe is simply another useful tool to add to your tool belt to use a cheesy cliche. It should compliment all the other things you’re doing.
I do know, however, that the “travel gems” that appear on Uptake are indexable. It’s up to Travel writers to weigh in and see if it lines up with their particular website. I for one though, don’t see why travel bloggers wouldn’t at least take the time to give it a few months and see how it helps them.
Glad to see the healthy discussion here.
Spencer said: “My website is in it’s infancy, 8 weeks old, but I started using Uptake’s travel gems recently. 4 weeks ago my keywords were not appearing in search engines and I was getting no traffic from Uptake. Over the last couple weeks, I’ve been getting about 30% of my traffic from keywords in search engines and getting some visitors here and there from Uptake.”
4-8 weeks is about how long it would normally take a new blog to start getting indexed by search engines. I’m not saying that Travel Gems didn’t help, but I’d be interested to see the statistics from a more established blog as you would not expect such a rapid rise. Of course, I could always go and try it myself!
Agree, a hugely clever set up here by Uptake, especially for Uptake.
Clearly the order for Uptake is
1. SEO
2. User experience
3. Blogger Recognition
On the technical bit?
I’m a fan of Uptake and their work in semantics and this may or may not be a first but I can’t see how technical it is when,
- bloggers manually link to a specific Uptake page
- Uptake sees that link because of the ping back system built in wordpress and other blog engines
- Uptake editors manually read and then approve the post (if it “meets their editorial citeria”) I’d say also manually ensuring the landing page and the incoming link match at the same time thereby handling the Mix and Match part.
Pat please let me know if I’ve missed the big technical part here but it seems Uptake is using pingback for exactly what it’s built to do and everything else is manual?
From the Uptake site – “Eventually, we will be able to include appropriate posts with or without a pingback. We call that “Phase Two”. In the meantime, feel free to send relevant post links to: pat at uptake.com.”
On the comparison the LP Blogsherpa.
I do think the Uptake approach of showing an extract and linking to the originating source is far fairer than LP’s (if as Sam Daams says they reproduce the whole article – why would you follow a link to the originating blog if you’ve already read the post?)
IMHO it’s absolutely a predominantly SEO play with the desired outcome being.
Huge inbound link generation.
Large weighting of inbound links to out bound links. If successful there could be 100’s inbound links to the California page but how many outbound links to posts off that page?
Better SEO quality of inbound links, England to the England page, California to the California page than outbound links which are {link text Post heading} to {Post page}.
The benefits for Uptake’s SEO at the head and the tail are massive even where Google (or Uptake) labels the post on the destination blog as the original source and authority for the post, all the juice for the keywords and search terms is Uptakes so it’s a very smart play.
I had a look around and found a post by
http://colleenfriesen.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/520/
This post had no less than 5 links to Uptake pages from the one post. They were
Astoria
Oregon
Washington
Brookings, Oregon
California
Every other post I saw on that blog had a very good SEO link to an Uptake page. England to the Uptake England page etc
On the Uptake California page there is two posts that link out to blogs and one is Colleens.
My questions for Pat at Uptake would be how will Uptake determine share of voice? Ie What post will be shown when you have 100 posts coming in and only 2 spots on Uptake to show posts?
If it’s in rotation will I be notified how many times my post is shown?
If I don’t get stats how can I be sure that Worldhum or those bloggers with higher page rank don’t get preferential share of voice or exclusive treatment via the “editorial criteria”? Is there a published editorial criteria? I couldn’t see one.
Do bloggers get notified when a post has been approved (or not approved) and will (or will not) be shown on the Uptake page.
I like the idea of aggregating and uncovering great content but I think it needs to be very transparent.
A great discussion. One thing that clearly stands out at me after following it is how interests can be so aligned, just because end goals are so different.
Everyone should do what works for them, and heck, I like this idea so much I might try implementing something similar on TP
I thought I’d end with a tip to bloggers, as long as LP doesn’t get wise to it
Whilst bloggers probably don’t like the concept of LP publishing full content of posts on their site, it does offer one great advantage to those that want to make a few dollars on the side. Now you can sell clean follow’d text links on *Lonely Planet*’s website. Seeing all the big companies dropping 100 USD per link per page per month on good domains, you only need about 25 pages to be included in LP’s blogsherpa program to have a nice 2500 USD a month recurring income…. most bloggers couldn’t charge the same for links on their own site, so this really is a win-win.
Of course Google frowns on any kind of manipulating of their search index by selling links, so the really cunning would put the link in long enough for Lonely Planet to include it on their site, then remove it from their own… now the only site getting penalized would be Lonely Planet
Yes, evil, I know. Use at your own risk!
In summary:
Spencer says: “why does a dog pee on a fire hydrant?”
Sam Daams responds: “because the [revenue-seeking-and-amoral] dog [blogger] can pocket $100 and potentially get LP sandboxed on Google.” (BTW Don’t do this!)
Funny how everyone’s personality has just come out on this thread. OK, I gotta find a hydrant, see you later.
Amoral? By Google’s standards maybe… which raises the point, is it really possible to be amoral by an amoral company’s standards?
never!
“Do no evil” is a moral stance, even if they don’t always abide by their own moral standards.
Does anyone want a good old link on the isango! blog roll?
@daniele – Tnooz is still crushed at not being included.
True – it’s in fact a consumer blog… but I will try to work out something moral for you.
Questions I have as a blogger:
1) How much traffic does Uptake get? This sort of is important if you are promising to deliver traffic.
2) How much traffic has been driven and what is the click through rate for the tests they’ve done so far?
This is sort of missing from the whole equation. I KNOW that linkjuice will be passed, but the traffic going in the other direction is sort of a mystery.
Currently Uptake receives over 1.5MM Unique visits per month – keep in mind that uptake.com is only 1.5 years old (was launched in July/August (if my memory serves me correctly
and has been growing very quickly.
On the clicks to the blogger obviously this depends on the “compellingness” of the headline of the blog post & how good of a topical match it is. That said, the program is also brand new & the traffic leaves our site (via a clean link) which means that only the blogger knows for sure how much traffic they have received from a particular page on UpTake where they have been featured.
Hopefully some of the bloggers who participate will tell us how well it is working so that we can work to optimize the placement and drive even more traffic to bloggers.
Gary – We would love to have you participate – please contact either myself of Pat Jenkins here at uptake – my email is brian a t uptake d0t c0mm.
Brian, what happens in cases like the one Carl points out, where there are more links pointing in than spaces to link out (some pages like SF already have 5 blogger links out, in addition to a dozen+ ‘resource’ links). The links out go in rotation? Or they get hidden using CSS? Or they just disappear?
a couple of things to keep in mind:
We include up to 5 blog posts on a particular page, they are graded by the editors managing our system on a scale (high medium low) based on quality of the article (writing) and relevance to the page in question on UpTake.
Based on this criteria if a page accumulates more than 5 gems – then then rest are moved to a “view all page” – The main page links to this page, and the links on this page are still “findable by google”
Uptake has hundreds of thousands of pages, and hundreds in each city (for major cities) so there are many many opportunities to be featured. I recommend that if a page is already full – say the “San Diego” main city page is full – then link to a more specific topical page (depending on the topic of your article) on UpTake like San Diego golfing, or San Diego hotels, or San Diego family hotels, etc. These pages often get even more traffic than our main city pages because they already rank high in Google: (try searching for “family hotels in San Diego”, or “romantic hotels in Niagara Falls” in Google)
The blogger can always choose where they think their post should go on UpTake.com by where they link. We sometimes will actually move page where it will appear if we feel that the post is more relevant to a different page – but this is rare, because it’s actually something an editor does manually, and it’s time consuming
Honestly, with very very few exceptions most pages are not full, and probably won’t get full for a long time (really there are not THAT MANY travel bloggers out there… it’s a pretty exclusive club
so I would not worry about it too much.
Personally – as a professional online marketer of over 10 years, I can tell you the program was designed with the question of “if I were a blogger and I learned of the program, would I participate?” I can honestly tell you that the answer from my personal perspective is yes – because of the link value, because of the traffic value, and because of the mind-share value that is possible. This is a very unique and cool opportunity for the blog community to participate, and get featured (and found) in a way that is not possible elsewhere on the web. It’s also incredibly easy to participate – you don’t have to install anything, or change your blog in any way which is also very cool. You can just link, only when it’s relevant and you as a blogger personally feel that the page you are linking to is a good resource for your reader. Then in exchange you will get the opportunity to be featured on that very page
As suggested I Googled “family hotels in San Diego” and checked out the Uptake page. The Travel Gem listing is actually a feed across to what looks like an inhouse Uptake blog (the Uptake Vacations blog). So is that just a fill entry till you have some bloggers writing on the topic or are the bloggers going to be competing against inhouse Uptake writing to take one of the five slots? It’s a minor question I guess, but given anything pushed back to the “View all page” will see a pretty drastic drop in traffic compared to those featured, it is probably relevant.
Telling me your total traffic doesn’t mean much if it is spread across tens or hundreds of thousands of pages. It isn’t like 1.5m people are going to see the link to my site.
Google shows Uptake.com with 202,000 pages indexed and Yahoo shows 891,000. That means on average, each page on uptake is only getting 2-5 visits per month.
If you put 5 links to a blog on a page, and factor in a normal internet click through rate of under 10%, I’d expect to get about 1-3 visits per year from this program for an average page. (a high traffic page would get more obviously)
It really doesn’t seem worth the time to type out a link for that.
Indeed Stuart, an acute observation,posts from the UpTake blogs also feed into the travelgems system – however the system is configured such that posts from external sites (other than upTake) generally will be listed ABOVE the UpTake posts – we began testing this system with our own travel blogs (as they say “eat your own dog food”
)
Of course the UpTake editors have the ability to override the defaults, but what that means is that generally speaking the UpTake Blog posts don’t “count” towards the 5 posts per page that I mentioned earlier.
-Brian
This is a massive SEO play and I wish I had thought of it first. To say it’s anything different is just trying to blow smoke in people’s eyes.
Well, talk about a conversation starter…As one of the first bloggers to take part in Travel Gems, several weeks in I’m very happy with the program. I’ve so far linked about 20 posts, both new and relatively ancient, and have seen a bump of about 20 visitors per week on many of them. Small change for now, but world domination is generally a slow process for us all.
And I’m with Kim — having direct access to/feedback from human beings at Uptake is a guile-free experience.
Here’s an example of one of my Travel Gems links: http://bit.ly/95kHUn
Would you have linked to that hotel’s page on Uptake rather than the hotel’s own website (www.posthotel.com) if it weren’t for this setup?
I hope for bloggers the links they get don’t go the same way as the links to the hotel’s own official site and tripadvisor, travelocity etc have gone on Uptake. Those links are cloaked, so only visible to us users. Google just sees plain text, so wouldn’t follow the links or give the sites linked up any credit at all. This is *super* advanced SEO, and I think speaks volumes about the train of thought here.
So for twenty people a week, you’re willing to give away the SEO farm? Can I use your site? I’m willing to bet I can give you more than 20 people a week.
This is what gets me about programs like this. Bloggers are willing to give away a lot more than they get back. For the link juice you are giving out, you could keep it and sell it to people or just keep and make the value of your website stronger.
World domination with your website will not come through partnerships like this. There are better ways to get 20 people a week without giving away so much of your sites SEO worth
This thing just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The whole Uptake 100 was just a big Google scam too. So far it has basically done nothing in exchange for taking the FULL content of everyone RSS feeds and putting it on Update.
I’d like to publicly state either a) remove my RSS feed from the Uptake 100 site, or b) remove me as a member of the Uptake 100.
I’ve contacted Update but so far nothing has been done.
Gary, sorry you feel these programs are “Google scams.” Travel Insights 100 can absolutely become more valuable to all participants but it is by no means “a big Google scam.” Yes the program is beneficial to UpTake from a SEO perspective. Yes, it is also beneficial to the 100 participants from an SEO perspective. No, we don’t want the benefits to end there. That’s why we host meetups in cities and at conferences, and even work with PhoCusWright to secure discounted passes to ITB Berlin and other conferences for the TI100.
I just emailed Pat and reminded her to get in touch with you to either (a) remove you from TI100 at your request or (b) just remove your RSS feed. Either way is fine with us. Sorry for the delayed response.
BTW, the whole RSS feed on TI100 was just a placeholder until we figured out what to do with that site. I honestly don’t even care about having your content on TI100 – Google knows its just syndicated from your site and doesn’t “steal” any traffic from you or any other blogger–everything is linked, attributed, and comes off of an RSS feed which Google already knows about. UpTake just hasn’t had time to come up with the next generation approach to TI100 so the RSS feeds and the site has somewhat languished. Honestly the whole program slowed down after I left because we were down 1 person and we haven’t rehired anyone…2 people left doing 3 people’s work…so I feel bad enough about it as is for leaving this work undone, Gary, thanks a lot.
Anyway, this is all “inside baseball” but I figure everyone following this thread is already in that zone and likes “transparency” and some lite social media arguing back and forth. Bottom line is that *no one* should do business with people they don’t trust. Everyone’s got to make that decision based on the behavior of the company or the individual over time.
Sam Daams, I’ll let UpTake confirm that the Travel Gems links are not “cloaked” and that the links are clean links to the bloggers. I would be shocked if that were not the case. Honestly, I don’t think Travelocity really needs our link love. On the other hand, bloggers do.
I find it humorous that it is the most sophisticated SEO practitioners (e.g. Sam and Gary) that are the most cynical and critical of the program. The feedback is welcome and worthy of response. UpTake, what say you?
Elliott, you are scrapping the content of most of the members of the community. Why would you want to replicate one of the most disreputable things someone can do to a blogger?
There is no reason to do it at all. None. Excuses about Google knowing where it came from are BS.
Are you cool with me taking Uptake content and putting it on my site?
I mean hey, we’re all a community, right?
If you think that the most sophisticated SEO people are the most cynical, it is another way of saying the least knowledgeable SEO people are the ones going along with it.
Gary,
Scrapers take information without asking.
All of the TI100 members have the option to: (a) provide full feed, (b) provide partial feed, (c) provide NO feed. Happy to comply with whatever anyone wants to do and still have them participate as a member. You included.
First of all, I don’t work for UpTake anymore so you’ll have to ask them if its cool with them if you take UpTake blog content and put it on your site.
But here’s what I would say if I were still working for UpTake:
“UpTake has RSS feeds for all of our blog content.
YES, you are welcome to take any RSS feed we have and put it on your site. Just have an attribution link on each post, exactly as we have done on TI100. I’m totally cool with it because Google will just see that as a positive vote from Everything-Everywhere.com to UpTake.com’s blog. Go ahead, we are all a community so you’re welcome to go ahead and syndicate our content. That’s the whole reason why there is RSS in the first place. But thanks for asking, that is the right way to do business.”
Anyway, I can’t speak for the company any more. You can ask Pat if you want to take our full feed and put it on Everything-Everywhere. I hope she says yes, it will only benefit your readers and our site!
It was never clear to me that the full feed was going to be published. I assumed that a link to the RSS feed would be provided. In fact, I think talking to some other bloggers, many people made the same assumption I did.
I assumed it because no one in their right mind would try to take the entire content of another person’s website, let alone 100 people, and put it on their site.
I’m dumbfounded that you can’t see what is wrong with this Elliott. Seriously.
Just to be clear Elliott, I didn’t say Uptake are cloaking the links to the bloggers, they aren’t.
But they also weren’t cloaking the links to Tripadvisor etc when those were first added. Not until nofollow became ‘link juice leak’ was that changed up. Frankly I’m impressed Uptake has managed to negotiate that kind of terms with such an SEO savvy company like Tripadvisor!
Re. travelocity ‘needing’ link love. From the obvious link buying by them all over the internet, I think they might have a different answer
Yahoo Travel clearly is getting that link love from Uptake, and I’m sure one could argue they don’t ‘need’ the link love either 
Sooooo, your idea of a placeholder is to take the entire content of someone’s blog????
Gary, you’re not listening to me and I’m not going to argue with you anymore. We can just agree to disagree on this one.
In the meantime, let me express my respect for you and my bromantic feelings for you as a blogger. ***xoxoxo smack***
Gary, I also don’t have your email anymore because I left it on my work computer at UpTake. feel free to email me at elliott at ngventures d0t c0m if u want to chat via email as well.
Hi Gary, sorry I didn’t respond to you sooner, but my video card in my computer no longer works, I am attending a conference and just got to my home computer this morning. I removed you from TI 100 as requested. The intent of that program was to create community, it was not a “Google” program. We actually derive very little SEO benefit from it as a company. Many bloggers sent me a partial feed to include in TI 100 versus a full feed. They seem to be happy with that solution. A few wanted no feed, we complied. The idea was to create one place to see the best in travel conversations across categories.We are still developing TI 100 and are discussing how to deliver more value to each individual participating. I would love any suggestions you may have.
Our intent with Travel Gems is to highlight great blogs on our site, hopefully deliver traffic to them and create a program delivering SEO for all parties. We realized many bloggers may not want to link to us for many reasons, the desire not to share a link, doesn’t work with content flow, etc. which is why they can submit a post to us via email (travelgems@uptake.com) and the posts can be included without a link to our site. We received email requests like this already as a result of the coverage on Tnooz. We published those immediately. We have yet to see the results of the program for bloggers, but in the next few months, I expect it to help the participants. In
There is no reason, whatsoever, at all, for putting the full feed of another website on yours.
None.
It is the behavior of a scraper site. I’m not sure why Uptake would want to duplicate the behavior of a scraper. It makes you look bad. Very bad.
So bad that the idea of creating a community is called into question when in fact you are scrapping the content of most of the members of the community. What sort of community takes the content of its members? What possible reason is there to do that?
Can you at least see how this looks really bad?
I wasn’t even aware of the scrapping until today and it became a big issue on This Week In Travel.
I’ve had few dealings with Uptake, but they all seem to be of a “gimme a link” nature. This travel gem thing is just the latest thing to leave me with a very bad taste in my mouth.
I have no problem with what Uptake is doing, but the way you are doing it has struck me as being very cheesy and one sided.
I love the spirited conversation – this all really is “inside baseball” as they say, but I think it is great to have these conversations openly and honestly. I am an online marketer of 10 years, only in the last 3 have I really gotten particularly advanced as an “seo practitioner” but I have launched many sites from scratch over the years, and I can tell you just how hard it can be to get Google to “trust” you. it takes an incredible amount of time and effort asking for links, creating content that you *hope* someone will like enough to read, and possibly even link to. I mean honestly if you are new, starting out, or even a medium sized fish – marketing yourself online is a lot of really hard work.
So yes does UpTake get SEO benefit from travel gems? yes! Do bloggers get seo benefit from the program? yes! do UpTake users get benefit from the program? Yes! Do bloggers get a new stream of readers from uptake pages that they would not normally get? Yes! Would UpTake have created this program if all those things were not true? – Of course not! if there was no Benefit to UpTake, the company would not pursue it, and if there were no benefits to bloggers, bloggers would not participate!
It’s really hard to get noticed out there, marketing a blog is hard work! Getting someone to care about what you have to say is a challenging proposition – it takes months if not years of constant effort. Does this program replace the need to market yourself in other ways? Of course not! It is just one more avenue to get noticed. But if the program was not win-win it would not work, and lots of bloggers are already participating and seeing great results in terms of their own traffic, is a pretty good indication that it is a win-win.
We manually review every single gem to make sure it’s not spam – and we take special care to ensure that the content is useful to our users. I think that speaks volumes to our objectives, if this were “just an seo strategy” we certainly would not go to all of that expense.
At the end of the day – it’s easy to sit out there and poke holes in someone else’s hard work, and by cynical and suspicious. That’s easy. Building up your traffic online? That’s hard getting readers to care? That’s hard. Making something that’s truly unique and interesting that people will use and notice? That’s REALLY hard. UpTake has worked very hard to embrace the blog community over the last several years and we are taking steps to give them a louder voice on our site – do we hope to get something in return? We do. But that does not mean it’s not a win-win situation.
The links to the bloggers participating in travelgems are, are will remain “clean” “normal” and “seo-friendly” for as long as I have anything to say about it that’s a promise. Honestly – I hope many bloggers choose to participate in the program; it really is a unique and cool opportunity to be featured on a quickly growing travel site that really embraces the blog community, and values what they have to say. This program is new, and we are always looking for ways to make it work better for bloggers. I hope that anyone with questions will take the time to email me and ask them. I will answer you personally. Brian a—t uptake dd0t cccomm
Sam, for almost two years I did have a link to the Post Hotel’s website — when I learned about Travel Gems, I just swapped the old link for one to Uptake.com. To me, it seems a worthwhile experiment to use some of my blog’s real estate to see if I can get more traffic and expand my community.
But you and Gary know way the heck more about how SEO works than I do, so I assure you, I’m not discounting what you’re saying. You’ve given me the inspiration for more research.
That said, I don’t equate Travel Gems with scraping. Presently, a beta site called StartTags is busy scraping (or, as they seems to consider it, “archiving”) my blog’s content on a daily basis, and I loathe their messy and unwelcome efforts every time one of their pings shows up in my Akismet spam folder. Conversely, I’ve handpicked my own Travel Gems posts in exchange for an excerpt and photo on a site that I have no personal reason not to respect and which has a lot more traffic than I do.
Travel Gems is not scrapping. The Uptake 100 list is scrapping.
Ciao Bambino is part of the TI 100 Program. We were clearly invited to participate and submitted information (i.e. our posts didn’t suddenly just show up there one day) and I was/am interested in the opportunity to be an active member of a community of leading travel bloggers and experts in their respective categories.
Although there have been some glitches along the way, Pat has always taken immediate action fix problems for us. The value of a structured forum for this community outweighs the downside of having our feed re-published externally (assuming there is no SEO penalty) and my take is that Uptake is serious about finding ways for the program to be more impactful for all.
We just started participating in Travel Gems. Finding ways create brand awareness and drive qualified, relevant traffic back to Ciao Bambino in a meaningful way (either via SEO or direct links) is our primary objective and it seems that the Travel Gems program supports that goal. Moreover, I’ve been impressed with the way it’s been managed by Uptake to date with a responsive team on the other end working to ensure both parties benefit.
Wow. Wonder where UpTake got the idea for that from: http://wandermom.com/news-and-views/how-online-travel-agencies-could-leverage-blog-content/
Yes Wandermom was one of the sources of original inspiration for this Travel Gems initiative. Pat would invoke your name every now and then and over time, it eventually bubbled up as the next thing we wanted to do. Look at the date on your post: April 26, 2009. Can’t believe it took us a year to do it. Should have done it earlier!
Obviously a very interested discussion here.
@wandermom you’re obviously way ahead of your time
Did, as in mention in your post, get to discuss your idea with anyone else in the industry who thought it was a good idea?
Did Travel Gems turn out how you thought it might work?
Are you participating?
As I said before I really do think aggregating and making quality bloggers and their blogs more accessible is a great idea transparency is key. Uptake is clearly able to show a compelling case for bloggers in the traffic department the rest as Elliot rightly says is a judgement call for bloggers.
A quick look at firebug shows the links from Uptake back to bloggers are clean and visible.
@any one from Uptake
Some of my questions from before.
Q: How will Uptake determine share of voice? Ie What post will be shown when you have 100 posts coming in and only 5 spots on Uptake to show posts?
A: 5 on page, balance on view all page.
Q: Do the 5 rotate? Do they change if a new post comes in deemed to be better?
Q: Will bloggers get any sense or stats on how many times a post is shown on the Uptake page, whether in the top 5 or on the show all page? (We can obviously track click throughs but not impression on Uptake so hard to judge CTR/performance)
Q: Is there a published editorial criteria? I couldn’t see one.
Q: Do bloggers get notified when a post has been approved (or not approved) and will (or will not) be shown on the Uptake page.
Thanks all for the insightful comments.
@ Michelle Duffy–I invoked your name all the time and shouted about your brilliance. You were definitely part of the inspiration
@carl: We will select posts that are most relevant. If we ever get to the point where we have more than three per page, we can roll them to another page. At this point, that is a nice problem to have.
We are trying to automatically share page views with the bloggers. it is on our Travel Gems 1.1 idea list.
No published editorial criteria, but now you suggested it, we will do so.
Yes, we notify all bloggers once a post is approved and published. We are working on automating that process.
Thanks, everyone.
I am a travel blogger who discovered Uptake on another blog, related to travel writing. I was excited about the Travel Gems program, especially since Blogsphera for LP is closed (and I don’t know when or if the program will continue). Now, after this very spirited conversation, I must say that I have mixed feelings about joining, but I am curious…