Dear Food Bloggers, Protect Your Content
Dear food bloggers,
We are a group of dedicated food bloggers from Food Bloggers’ Heaven, a Danish-based Facebook group with 205 members. We’re writing to you because we’ve found your blog on one of Media 203 AB’s 25 food recipe search engines.
We would like to tell you about how the recipe search engines work, and what that means for your blog.
At the outset everything seems fine; a search engine that helps readers find the right recipe among hundreds of Danish food blogs. The priority of search engines, like
Findeopskrifter, is always to generate income for its owner. By attracting a lot of traffic, it creates a base for selling advertising. There’s nothing wrong with that in itself. However, it’s the way Findeopskrifter goes about it that has rubbed us up the wrong way.
We won’t go into all the technical details here – you can see the documentation on that on http://kasperbergholt.org/foodbloggers
Basically, 203 Media AB recipe search engines use your blog to lure customers in to their business. They do that when you sign your blog up and give them permission to show your content in exchange for traffic back to your blog from their site.
On the links that track back to your blog, they’ve been ‘creative’ and added a so-called ‘no-follow-attribute’. And what’s that, you may ask? Well, it’s a little message to tell major search engines such as Google that the link isn’t safe and, therefore shouldn’t count when the site is ranked.
In other words, it determines how high the pages of your blog are shown on, for example, a Google search result list. On top of this, Media 203 AB asks you to add a little badge – a logo, if you will – to your blog. This gives full link value from all the pages of your blog to 203 Media AB’s recipe search engine.
All of this means that 203 Media AB recipe search engines gradually move up the list generated by search engines such as Google, and your blog moves further down it. It is extremely important for bloggers interested in building their readership that their blog can be easily found on Google and not at the bottom of an endless list of links to 203 Media AB recipe search engines. It also means that 203 Media AB is cashing in on the traffic it is diverting from your site, as the traffic now becomes theirs. As far as we are concerned, this is not a decent way to do business.
Many of us have been wary of 203 Media AB’s search engines from the very beginning and have therefore not signed up, despite repeated requests from the company. Those that have actually agreed to join have had great difficulty in getting out of it again, despite demanding to be released.
We cannot make decisions concerning your blog or tell you what to do. However, now that you know how 203 Media AB recipe search engines operate and what the consequences can be, we merely ask that you give it some thought. Is it okay that they earn on your work? Or would you rather not be exploited? We do not accept it, and would like to help you if you do not want to be a part of 203 Media AB’s little scam.
We encourage you to sign out of 203 Media AB’s recipe search engines for your country and, in doing so, join us in sending the signal that it is not acceptable to make money on the work of others in such an underhand way. This is the only way in which we can hope to change the behaviour of 203 Media AB and get them to treat us, and our work, with respect.
With kind regards
Madbloggerne Himmel (Food Bloggers’ Heaven)
Translated from Danish by Kim Mühlhahn & Kerry Kassow
