Aggregating Travel Gems Will Boost Relevance for Travellers
UpTake, the world’s largest travel and hotel review metasearch site, is now featuring relevant excerpts from blogs from across the web alongside its 20 million travelers’ reviews and 775,000 places to stay.
The new program, “Travel Gems from Bloggers”, is the first of its kind, leveraging pingback technology to find, match and deliver bloggers’ relevant travel stories directly to the page where a user is reviewing information about trip details.
Travel Gems is an aid to travelers and a boon for writers. Site visitors benefit from the personal recommendations found on relevant blog posts by seeing them in the context of their travel research on UpTake. This new resource helps travelers make more informed decisions about their trip, while bloggers benefit from reaching an entirely new audience and building traffic with these new readers.
World Hum, a Travel Channel website, is the premier content partner of the program. World Hum’s travel stories are featured on pertinent pages throughout UpTake. Michael Yessis, coeditor-in-chief of World Hum said, “We’re excited to be able to share some of our award-winning travel stories, and to help travelers discover new ways to see the world.”
Yen Lee, president of UpTake said, “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. Plus, it offers a new source of traffic to bloggers by sending our audience to their sites.”
“Travel Gems” also features blog content from smaller, independent bloggers. While some are specifically travel writers, many others have a different primary focus – from parenting to food to sports. Their featured posts may include the inside scoop about a local restaurant, how to get a deal on tickets at a sporting venue, a favorite unknown beach, or the best playground in the neighborhood – all relevant and useful information for a traveler.
The curated posts featured on the site include the post title, blog name, a thumbnail image and a teaser excerpt from the blog, to help UpTake visitors determine if they want to read more.
Interested bloggers have two options for participating in “Travel Gems”:
- Join “Travel Gems” by submitting links to travelgems@uptake.com for review; or
- Link back to UpTake.com in a relevant post. The link pings Uptake, and alerts the editors that they should review the post for inclusion in Travel Gems.
More information is available at Travel Gems from Bloggers on UpTake.
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/…
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.
I have been writing Travel Gems daily. See http://www.smartwomentravelers.com for this year's Travel Gems. My blog: http://www.pearlsoftravelwisdom.com.
Uptake has been changing quite a bit, I do like that they're going less from hardcore SEO, and providing a user experience.
Interesting way of promotion. But if I understand right only works with ping enabled blogs.
Uptake has been working hard to set up more ways to pick up posts you can ask them to subscribe to your RSS feed in order to pick up posts.
The post appear based on relevance and regency. You get more posts, than whats on the page, when you hit the ” read all ” button on the Travel gems.
You can see this:
http://www.uptake.com/california/san_francisco….
This seems like a project that could benefit all the parties involved. Lets wait and see how people react and how business will develop in the future. Although some people might find it useful, I dare anyone to try and sort the ocean of information found on UpTake.