Smart Marketing by Glengarriff Lodge
February 18, 2008 at 3:38 pm
It seems some parts of the blogging community are up in arms about this. You can read the comments over on Mulley’s blog. I fall in with those who disagree with Mulley’s view. As far as I’m concerned, I was presented with the opportunity to enter a competition for a prize that I personally would value. The competition rules stated that I must link to their site using certain keywords. I’m happy to do that. I’m don’t understand those who are getting up in arms about it. It’s not going to damage the lodge’s search engine ranking because the links are naturally occurring and I seriously doubt they are going to happen in sufficient numbers to alert Google. I do agree with Sabrina Dent’s comments on Twitter however, that the tags on the site are rank. If they are running the competition to improve their search engine ranking, they should start with the basics first and get their tags working for them.
It’s great to see intelligent marketing by businesses who don’t necessarily have a massive budget! Glengarriff Lodge is a luxury self catering villa nestled in the ancient oak woods of Glengarriff, Co Cork. It looks amazing, and hopefully this post will earn me a nice little weekend break there.
You see, Glengarriff Lodge is looking to increase its search engine ranking and knows the importance of links. So it is running a competition to encourage bloggers to link to their site using a given keyword string – luxury self catering villa – and if there are 25 entries, on March 11th 2008 they will announce a winner! In addition, they are looking to spread the idea virally, so I’m supposed to link to a friend who might be interested. So I chose someone who is not only a real foodie, and has a blog, but is also an incredibe networker who will surely spread the word!
Fair play to whoever came up with this idea! Thanks also to Tom Raftery on whose blog this came to my attention. And good luck to Glengarriff Lodge who deserve to power on up the rankings now and enjoy the fruits of being on top for luxury self catering!
Comments (3 responses)
Maryrose,
thanks for the link and good luck in the competition!
I actually heartily approve of the way Glengarriff Lodge have reviewed their competition entry criteria (or the wording thereof) after the negative feedback they got. Fair play on that count… All in all it’s a smart ploy and they get extra points for responding to community feedback promptly and intelligently. (If you are appealing to a community for assistance wth your marketing it is definitely the clever thing to do to take on board any feedback from that community especially if the feedback comes from particularly outspoken members of the community *grin*)
Actually, I’m pretty sure the links don’t count as “naturally occurring” and violate Google’s rules. Were I more cynical than I am (and granted, that would take some doing) I might think said marketing campaign was revised not because of the small blogging backlash but because this Google violation and the potential ranking penalties had been pointed out.
Except that in this case, while I personally know none of the people involved in the campaign, other people tell me that really, they are good eggs who just made a cock up. So I’m actually assuming the best and joining Salubri in approving of their responsiveness.
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