Travelblather

The dust hasn’t really settled on Google’s acquisition of the Frommer’s travel guide brand. I author Frommer’s guidebooks to Seville and Andalusia and the previous owner Wiley had made it clear it intended to find a purchaser several months ago. It’s been a frustrating wait – at least we now know who the new owner is. But what does it mean? Well the short answer is no one knows – but here are a few of my thoughts.

A big YES for quality content
I’ve always thought of Google as being on the ‘anti-professional content’ team. It set out originally to populate its clever tools like maps, places etc with user generated content. It was very much part of the ‘everything on the web should be free’ brigade. Spending cash – and a lot of it too – on a professional travel publisher makes it clear that Google sees that the web needs content created by professionals to be able to really deliver. Seeing as Google is the way most of us find stuff on the web, that’s a big endorsement for the idea of investing in quality content for your website to ensure search engine visibility. If the search engine itself is doing it, then you probably should to? (This tallies with all the stuff Google says in public - even if SEO folks might argue that frankly ranking well is still all about links.)

But what kind of content?
You can see immediately how listings – short accurate and appropriate write-ups of places like restaurants, hotels and shops will dovetail neatly with Google Places* – basically the content you get served up on a place’s Google + page when you click on a pointer on a Google map. This kind of thing was exactly why Google bought restaurant review publisher Zagat this year too – Zagat reviews now sit above user reviews. If you search for a specific place by name you’ll start to see Frommer’s reviews crop up in the search results pretty soon I imagine. Right now if you Google say New York and click maps the info if you click the pointer for New York features Wikipedia content – presumably we’ll start to see Frommer’s content on this page too. (*Is it called Google places? Does anyone else get completely confused by the way Google keeps chopping and changes its products?)

Does Google have any experience of print publishing though? I don’t think so(?) and that’s concerning for me as a guidebook writer and someone who believes passionately that guidebooks still have a place in travel planning and inspiration. I really hope the guidebook remains a core part of the product offering. Maybe as the Guardian newspaper has done there should be a move towards digital first but print should still be a part of the package. Interestingly adopting the mantra of 'digital first' suggests a need for fresher more up to date information. Could that lead to more regular updates and indeed more work for professional guidebook writers? I hope so.

As promised, here's a second guest post - this one from travel writer David Whitley - he's taking a meat cleaver to certain practices in the SEO industry. Do you agree with him? 

The offal trade
Imagine, for the purpose of an overly extended metaphor, that you are a butcher. You know a shady character who will sell you discarded offal from the abattoir on the cheap. It’s not fit for human consumption, but you convince a few gullible restaurant-owners they can sell it as steak.

The restaurateurs  make a profit as a result of your offal, but are eventually fined heavily by trading standards or shut down by the police. So you suggest they  at least try to make the offal look like steak by hiding it inside other poor quality meat. And – even better – you’ll do the hiding for them. Customers soon realise they’re not being fed steak and leave in their droves. The restaurants get a reputation for poor quality which is passed on to the supplier – you.

It doesn’t take a genius to see what’s going to happen – the restaurants are either going to struggle to survive or get shut down. And if the same doesn’t happen to you, then the police are going to keep such a close eye on you that you may as well give up too.

The Trojan horses of SEO
This, I think, is where we currently stand with the web advertising industry. Or at least the SEO/ linkbuilding sector of it anyway. First they tried disguising links as adverts in the sidebars, and Google slapped down the sites that were buying such links. Now they’re trying to fill the web with sponsored posts written entirely for the purpose of squeezing in a link disguised as a feature. And if a website owner is really lucky, the SEO agency will supply a guest post that just about scans but is in no way readable. Again, the guest post is a Trojan horse for a link aimed at boosting Google rankings.

Jeremy’s previous post  - and several excellent comments – addressed this topic. The crux is that search engines (most pertinently, Google) want good quality content. Instead of continually finding ways to sneak around Google’s ever-increasing menagerie of toothy guard animals, SEO spivs are going to have to start attaching their links to that good quality content that Google wants. And that doesn’t mean looking for ever more sophisticated ways to dress the offal up as steak.

The dying sponsored post model
Here’s a prediction. The ‘sponsored post’ model that both marketers and owners of insipid blogs are so eager to cling to is dying. You can keep pumping it with ever more elaborate drugs, but it is fatally flawed. The ‘sponsorship’ in the term is closer in spirit to that in “state-sponsored terrorism” than “The FA Cup, proudly sponsored by E.On”.

That doesn’t mean that sponsored posts can’t work, however. In fact, done right, they’re probably far less obnoxious to the reader than flashing display adverts. But the sponsorship model needs to be more along the lines of sponsoring football clubs or roundabouts than sponsoring industrial sabotage. SEO people shouldn’t be thinking: “How can I sneak this by?” They should be thinking: “What would I be proud to attach this to?”

Let’s go back to the butcher’s shop. As it turns out, the cost of buying edible offal from the abattoir isn’t much more than buying the unfit stuff from the shady trader. There’s some more good news too – there are some restaurants in town that have good chefs. Chefs who have really good recipes which the offal can fit inoffensively into. They won’t pretend that the offal is steak, but they will make excellent sausages or meat pies that have small bits of your offal in them.

These restaurants can get a strong reputation and loyal customer base, while your butcher’s shop can bask in the glow of that reputation by boasting that you’re a proud supplier. Just let the chefs add the offal to their own recipes in a way that they know is best rather than trying to supply your own recipe book and forcing them to pretend it’s steak.

Launching the new model
Last week, I relaunched my website, GrumpyTraveller.com. With it, I put up an advertising rate card and details of advertising I will and won’t accept. The basic gist is that vetted advertisers are allowed to sponsor posts on the site for a fee, but that the topics of said post will be of my choosing. Alongside the post, they get a banner advert and a 75 word blurb at the bottom with a maximum of two links. That blurb needs to be aimed at humans rather than search engines – more a “we’re proud to be associated with this content and we’d like to tell you about what we do” than a desperate exercise in link stuffing. I’ll reject anything written as search engine bait. But once it is right, that ad and blurb stays with the post forever.

“We can supply a guest post…”
This is all pretty clearly explained, but I’ve already had queries about sponsored posts from SEO agencies who clearly can’t read. They’re wedded to the idea of providing guest posts stuffed with links. Frankly, if the guest post was any good, they’d be running it on their own site and attracting links organically from people who want to share and draw attention to it. It’s like when Gary Barlow writes one of his rare good songs, he saves it for Take That whilst churning out tons of mediocre ones to give to former X Factor contestants.

I’ve no doubt that I’ll also get a few unimpressed marketers who’ll tell me that what I’m charging is more than other sites charge.

Cheap audiences?
Fine by me, chaps. Go and sneak your links onto other sites where owners are happy to fill up their great web toilet with as much faeces as they can get paid for. When that toilet overflows and everyone involved comes out stinking of effluent, then the pariah status will be richly deserved.

I’m proud of the content on my site. It’s not just OK – it’s really good. I sincerely hope the readers of that content think so as well. I sincerely hope they trust its integrity and read it with the thoughtful intelligence that the comments (both on-site and via Twitter) suggest.

That’s not a cheap audience, and I won’t give them cheap content funded by cheap advertising. Want cheap and mediocre? Then there are plenty of other avenues. Good luck to you staggering down those increasingly dangerous alleys.

What advertising should be based on
The web needs an advertising model based on fairness, honesty and mutual benefit rather than deceit and desperately trying to resist arrest. One of human beings employing their brains, taste and judgement to think about what is a good fit. It needs something along the lines of sponsoring a small football or cricket club – you’re helping to fund something you’re proud to be associated with, whilst taking the opportunity to explain what you do to a distinct audience. Nothing sneaky, nothing nasty, nothing borderline dishonest.

It’d be sad to think that this idea is too revolutionary to stomach, but I suspect it will be for a while yet. Still, when the crushing realisation dawns that it’s far better to play well than search for gaps in the rule book, I’m happy to talk. I suspect a few other site owners will be too.

Image by: bunchofpants

My last post sparked some interesting debate! Here's the first of two guest posts that kind of take their lead from it.

It's by Mark Hodson. For those of you who don't know him, he's editor and co-founder of 101 Holidays. And he spent 12 years as a full-time freelance travel writer at The Sunday Times. He also consults on Travel SEO. Welcome!

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After the recent Travel Babble event in London, Jeremy published an interesting and provocative post, Time to Fire Your SEO manager? in which he questioned the role of SEO in travel. In the wake of Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, he argued, the key players are now the writers and the content managers. SEO managers, he said, should be spending their budgets on creating quality content - including paying travel bloggers - rather than fussing over rankings and links.

I was also at the event (here’s my write-up) and I shared Jeremy’s irritation that none of the panel of SEO experts seemed keen to spend money on commissioning writers. But this got me thinking: what is quality travel content anyway?

There is a general assumption - apparently shared by all those commenting on Jeremy’s post - that we all agree on the answer. I don’t think that’s true. Certainly, we can agree on what isn’t quality content - like all those $5 articles speed-written by students in Indonesia, or "spun" by software programs.

But has the very notion of what constitutes quality travel content changed since the evolution of the web?

In the days of print, it was pretty obvious. The likes of Bruce Chatwin and Eric Newby were quality. The rest of it was - give or a take a few award-winning articles in quality newspapers or magazines - tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapping. (And I say that as somebody who spent many happy and lucrative years writing for the fish and chip shop industry).

Quality travel writing was associated with long, introspective and reflective travelogues. Anything else - like Top 10 Mid-priced Hotels in Paris - was just hack writing.

But it was during the second half of the 1990s that the first-person travelogues in the weekend supplements were gradually eased out in favour of the Top 10s - what my editor at The Sunday Times called “service pieces”. Purists gagged at this populist approach. Old school travel writers stomped their feet in fury at the “decline in quality”. The editors were unmoved. They argued - rightly, in my view - that “service pieces” were what people wanted. Few people had time at the weekend to wade through 3,000 words about horse riding with nomads in Mongolia. It was the era of the no-frills city break and they wanted to know about 10 Mid-priced Hotels in Paris.

The instinct of the editors was proved correct with the advent of the web. When newspapers published their content online they could quickly see which articles were read, and which ignored.

The people spoke - and they wanted service pieces.

Then followed an unseemly rush to commission and write endless reams of service pieces, most of which were, frankly, useless. However, that shouldn’t obscure the fact that the best ones were well researched, well written, concise and bang up to date. They were useful. And, I would argue, high quality. Today we’ve moved on. There are tens of thousands of travel bloggers publishing their own work. And they are mostly writing ... not useful service pieces, but travelogues!

Some of these first-person narratives are engaging and thoughtful. But, let's be honest, most are dull, self-regarding and poorly written. Who - apart from the blogger’s friends - has the time or inclination to read them?

There’s a lot of talk now about how travel blogger’s should be “rewarded” for their work. Not only should tour operators and tourist boards give them free trips, they should also throw them cash. Really?

The problem with most travel bloggers is that they don’t engage with an audience that is likely to buy a holiday. Many are using their blogs to fund indefinite round-the-world journeys, staying at hostels or couchsurfing. Some spend more time Tweeting and Liking each other’s blogs than they do on the hard graft of writing. (And, believe me, if it’s not hard graft then you’re not doing it right).

Many bloggers have been lucky: they have found that SEO agencies are prepared to pay for links on their sites. In my view, Google’s Penguin update could kill that goose, with marketers only risking buying links from the most popular and highest-quality blogs. That may take a year or two to play out.

In the meantime, I believe there certainly is a market for quality travel writing - but we need to adjust what we mean by “quality”. We should stop thinking about school literature prizes and ask the question that Google keeps asking itself: what do people want?

I think the answer is content that is authoritative, reliable, informative and up-to-date. People want information they can trust. Yes, they want to be inspired. But mostly they want to be guided and helped to make the right decisions. They want to know that if they are going to spend hundreds or thousands of pounds on a holiday, it is going to meet their needs and expectations.

I’ve always said that if I was going to start a travel blog I would pick a lucrative but unpopular niche. Right now I would write about all inclusive family resorts. Or cruise holidays for retired people.

I can tell you one thing. I won’t be blogging any time soon about “how I’m travelling the world for free”.

The changes to the Google algorithm belie their cuddly  names – Pandas and Penguins might sound like friendly creatures, but these guys have a real bite.

I was at a recent event called Travel Babble organised by a Brighton-based SEO agency called Fresh Egg aimed at getting travel bloggers and SEO people in the same room. There was a panel Q&A session with a bunch of SEO people both client and agency side. The general commentary was that websites need to be more ‘normal’ these days – clever link tactics and technical tweaks are increasingly being discovered by the search engines (in particular Google) and sites doing this stuff too aggressively are getting penalised. The recommended SEO approach was to analyse the backlinks to a website you’re working on and review them. Has historic work to accumulate lots of links to boost the position of a website in search results left it looking a bit too good to be true? Are there thousands of links all using the same anchor text pointing to the same single page for example? Real people just don’t link to things like this and search engines increasingly spot these sites that are – to use the current term – ‘overoptimised’. (The word ‘overoptimised’ is itself a contradiction in terms… but anyway…)

The key way to fix this problem? Consensus from the panel was to create better quality content that’s more genuinely focussed on users rather than on search engines.

Hurray! That ought to be where a content creator like me comes in. But guess what? People are a tad more demanding than search engine robots. If you want to create good stuff that people really want to read, look at, engage with – you have to cough up some proper cash. It takes time, research, craft.  And there are no short cuts. Again and again the SEO guys on the Travel Babble panel dithered around this point. There’s an acceptance that ‘proper’ content is needed – but no desire to actually make the financial investment necessary to achieve this. There was a lot of waffle about 'getting hold of content' as it if was something you could go somewhere and harvest on the sly. (How about user reviews? That might work!) One panel member said ‘We have 5000-plus pages of content about places on our website. If anyone can tell me how to get hold of decent content for this quantity of pages feel free to tell me.”

Well – here’s the answer. Pay for it.

And accept that it’s a big investment. And see it as part of the whole marketing story for your business – not just something you can label SEO and stick in a separate box. Take cash from your loyalty marketing and brand budgets to pay for it.

The end goal for search engines is to be able to recognise the really useful, good stuff that people actually want and to promote it to the front of the queue. And I personally think they will get there. It’s just a matter of how long. Viewing things through the narrow prism of SEO and rankings is an increasingly out-moded way of working.

That’s a challenge for SEO agencies – but it’s also a challenge for the companies they work with. If you’re a travel co or tour operator and you have individuals in your marketing team called SEO managers – who are measured against key performance indicators that revolve around rankings and links and little else you are on a highway to confusion and you’re probably creating conflict within your business where it need not exist. Chasing search engine rankings without thinking about the bigger picture will become increasingly dangerous - more and more likely to get you penalised by the search engines. SEO is just one of a number of tools in your marketing tool box and you need to use the whole lot of them.

In the very near future good digital marketers will get SEO and understand how it works, but that will just be a part of their skillset and their responsibilities.

The days of the SEO specialist marketer are numbered.

Image: miralize

I just checked - I published 23 posts in 2011. Just about one a fortnight. I had some help from some great guests too.

So, looking back, which of my posts do I think are really insightful? Which ones do I think I'd tell a newcomer to Travelblather to read? Here's my top 5 for 2011. Interestingly(?) they are often posts that didn't get that many comments. Perhaps because they are more distilled and emphatic with less room for discussion? What do you think?

Free Sucks - Seriously I hate it
This theme percolates through much of my writing here on Travelblather. The idea that free is always good is frankly lazy and stupid. It typifies the mindset of the dumb consumer endlessly feeding on stuff that they are thrown - just because they can. With no thought about why it's free and what the implications are longer term of accepting it. Free is often really, really bad. This post explains why.

Forget Content - Think Curation and Connections
One of my first posts of 2011, this I think remains pretty pertinent - why create yet more content just because you can if someone else has done a great job already? With the zillions of new pages of content being added all the time online, search engines are struggling to make sense of it all. Maybe real people hold the final answer!

Choose Your 'Friends' Wisely
Many commentators suggest that social media came of age in 2011. Did it? I'm not so sure. But one thing is for certain, our online connections will have increasing importance as we go forward - in all sorts of ways. Some good, some bad. Maybe we need to think more carefully about who we are 'friends' with online and why?

Will Quality Content Beat Social Connections?
Just one comment on this post. But for me it's a bit of a call to arms for content creators. I feel strongly that the skills we possess are so undervalued in the online world. I remain convinced - as I say in this post - that quality, niche content written by experts will outlast the current excitement about social media and the social graph.

Endemic Corruption Or Just A Travel Press Trip?
OK. This one did garner a lot of comments (over 50). As often happens when the comments snowball, they went off topic quite a bit. There's some really interesting innovation going on with the travel blogging community as they seek to monetize their work more aggressively. I admire their boldness, but because travel bloggers are publishers as well as writers they risk alienating their readers if they get too caught up in chasing the bucks too overtly.

Thanks everyone who has read and commented in the last year. It's been great fun!

Any posts you found particularly useful? Anything you'd like to see more or less of in 2012? I'd love to hear what you think.