jemjabella

Tots100, Nofollow and Hypocrisy

This afternoon, I ended up on ‘Bloggers didn’t Come Down in the Last Shower‘, a post by blogger Sally deriding SEOs for their approach to bloggers, PR and paid links. Sally has a problem with PR/SEO types who disguise their intentions or outright lie about the potential damage to blogger’s search engine rankings caused by paid links that don’t carry the nofollow attribute.

No problems there, I agree completely. I get several e-mails on a daily basis from link builders who’ve clearly not read my blog or contact page who make out that they can provide me with content that’s the next best thing, beneficial to my site, bla dee freakin’ bla. Yawn, delete.

Sally links to a post she wrote for Tots100 in the beginning of her post. Unless you’re a parenting blogger, you’re probably unaware that Tots100 is a “community” that ranks bloggers who’ve signed up “using a unique scoring algorithm that reflects a blog’s popularity, influence and engagement”. That’s a toplist, to those of us who’ve been around since the 90s. Sally, incidentally, is the founder of Tots100. Anyway, the post discusses nofollow and why it’s important to add the attribute to paid links. It’s not the most technically accurate but given the audience is generally non-technical, I’ll forgive it that.

What bothers me about the Tots100 post, and the “bloggers aren’t stupid!” follow-up, is that it completely fails to mention the link to the family holidays website (‘familyholidays.co.uk’) contained within the Tots100 badge that all participating bloggers must place on their website to be included and/or ranked in the toplist/index/community/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. The link to the family holidays website is provided without the nofollow attribute. Now, the bloggers adding it to their sidebar might not be paid for its placement but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Tots100 don’t include this as a friendly gesture to the company behind familyholidays.co.uk. To spell that out for you: Tots100 will be financially compensated for their affiliation with the family holidays site. Financial compensation = it’s a bloody paid link! See update below

So why the hypocritical double standards? Haven’t figured that one out yet…

Update @ 20:11

Sally from Tots100 has stated that they are not paid or compensated for the links to the family holidays website. The links, across hundreds of blogs, are purely there (quoting #43687):

[..] Because it’s a great company, we’re happy to be associated with them, and that’s about as far as it goes.

I would argue that they still need to be nofollowed (untrusted link) but at least this means that, apparently, Tots100 aren’t slapping dofollowed advertising on member’s sites.

Potty ‘Training’ Update

Can it really be called potty ‘training’ if there’s no actual training? Or maybe the training part refers to Isabel training me into the next stage of parenting… I certainly feel like the past month has been the most confusing in the 2.5 years since Izz was born. Do we go straight to real pants or use training pants? Do we put a nappy on for nap time or not? Do we encourage use of the potty, the toilet, both? What about car journeys?

Turns out all these questions were mostly founded on unwarranted worrying, because Isabel is a pooping, peeing, potty training natural. So much so that she not only jumped straight into pants, no nappies for nap time and is happy to use either/both potty and toilet, but she also decided that she wanted to be dry at night too; I wasn’t expecting that for another year or so!

We had a minor blip a few weeks ago where Isabel had a little cough, which meant an accident or two (if I mention we were co-sleeping for one of those you can use your imagination a little there … yeah, it does occasionally have its downsides) and I chickened out and put her back in nappies overnight for a week. @SquintMom inadvertently guilted me into giving Izz another chance though, and we’ve been dry overnight again for the past 3-4 nights (and interestingly, in her own bed, not sure what’s inspired that!)

So yes, there we have it. Pretty much cracked I think? Touch wood. Just in time for number 2 to arrive safely (hint hint). Don’t know what I was worrying about…

Why are Mummy Blogs so Ugly?

I know, it’s true, I probably announced at one stage that I’d never read ‘proper’ mummy blogs (or blogs written by mums, whichever way you look at it). I also said I’d never talk about poo, and look how that turned out. Here is my confession: I, queen of the hypocrites, am a champion “mom blog” reader. If it’s well written or contains suitably awesome pictures, I will dip in and out for as long as my attention is held.

Except, so many of these blogs are just… ugly. Sure, not everyone can afford to hire an awesome designer like Lilian to sex their blogs up but even if you’re stuck using a free theme, there’s no excuse for these:

I tried to anonymise these – it’s not my intention to ‘out’ anyone in particular

Different size ad’ banners, blocks overlapping columns, seemingly random mixtures of fonts / sizes / colours etc. :(

I considered maybe it was just my long standing bias against ad-supported blogs making me grumpy, but Jamie has advertising spots and hers don’t look like they were vomited onto the page. PhD in Parenting has tons of adverts, well over my comfort zone even, but they’re all evenly sized and organised neatly.

I get that these bloggers are not (generally) web designers and that most have better things to do with their time (like mopping up sick and all the other fun crap that comes with having kids) than moving buttons and banners and content blocks 3 pixels to the left / right / up a touch, just one more tweak … I think I just turned into an awkward client. Ahem.

Perhaps surprisingly, given my previous rants on PPP etc, I get that many of these blogs generate that little bit of extra income per month that enables some parents to be at home with their kids (and for that reason alone I’m tempted to spew viagra links all up my sidebar). I just think that you can achieve a nice looking blog without distracting my eyes with spamerific banners and buttons, and without breaking the bank. At the end of the day, the content is more important than the adverts, and if you think otherwise then you’re seriously missing the point.

Well Hung Meat – 6 Months On

After a shaky start with The Well Hung Meat Company I didn’t think I’d be writing about them some 6 months on to tell you how much I’m enjoying having guilt-free meat (it’s organic, and the animals are grass fed) regularly delivered.

For starters, it goes to show that when a company makes an effort to reach out to customers to fix issues they raise that it can make the world of difference. Here I am, sat wearing my complimentary Well Hung Meat apron (what? it helps create a foody atmosphere. shut up.) whilst Googling for recipes for inspiration on what to do with the massive pork shoulder that arrived in my shiny silver meat box yesterday.

More importantly it has been a proof of concept for me: proof that I can afford to eat top quality meat without compromising on quality, simply by eating meat less often and making the most of what I get. I can’t remember the last time I only got one meal out of a piece of meat (and you should hear the ribbing I get from certain colleagues because of my left-over lunches, ha!)

I still find their website a little awkward to use — am in the midst of trying to edit my regular order to base it off their Household Staples box, but couldn’t seem to get everything off my old regular order first — but I think that’s the web developer in me being a grump. Plus, who knows, perhaps the sirloin steak I scoffed down last night with help my wonky iron levels… fingers crossed.

Where did all these posts come from?

I’ve done some thinking, and have decided that for now I am going to say ‘stuff you’ to anyone who wants to try and dig up shit / stalk me. As such I’ve imported the posts I created whilst I was “away”; nothing exciting but may flood your RSS feed (for which I apologise).

So, tentatively ‘back’…