I don’t mind getting prizes and I don’t mind pointing some of my American readers to places they can spend their euro in Ireland. I get up to three queries a week from couples with kids in college as they consider Ireland as a summer destination. While I cannot recommend Glengarriff because I haven’t stayed in it, I trust FrankP enough to profile the place and to affiliate it with the phrase people use to land on my blog site while searching for things to do when visiting Ireland.

“Luxury self-catering”? Who the hell types that into a search engine anyway? SEO tossers, that’s who. People who want to point at their Google juice for some inhuman phrase, absent any benefit to the business.

If I’m advising these people (which I’m not, but anyway) I’d try drumming in the importance of the “Would I do this?” test. Would you EVER type the word ‘luxury’ into a search engine? (Lots of people say yes to this, lyingly.) Really? When was the last time you did so? (Nobody answers the follow-up.)

Who enters ‘luxury self catering’? Nobody. (‘Four star’, maybe, but not this.)

Who goes searching for ‘self catering’ without saying where? Nobody.

Googlebombing “turkey and banana sandwiches” to this URL would be exactly as useful, and exactly as smart a way of spending money.

I’d avoid linking to it like the plague though, cos if they get penalised you wouldn’t want to get any on you.

It was never intended to cause controversy, or indeed to contravene Google guidelines.

We felt that we were on the right side of a line which is debated at length in many places.

However, because the primary intention was to promote Glengarriff Lodge, based on feedback we have received such as your own, we have modified the competition…

I hope that the modifications will quell the controversy, thanks for your feedback, and good luck in the competition!

Cheers,
Frank

I also don’t think I would ever blog if someone had to ‘approve’ my posts.

-omar

I’ve been thinking about reporting the competition URL for a couple of weeks.