An email in my inbox today that’s really pissed me off: it’s from a marketing agency on behalf of a well-known educational institution to which I have linked in a past post (getting on for 2 years ago) using its top level URL. The email asks ‘if you would not mind either amending your current link text, or creating an additional link using the following target URL and link text’.
What are the changes they’d like? If it were to fix a broken link, I wouldn’t mind. But it’s clear to me that this is a marketing thing - trying to improve their Google rankings for a ‘why study at our institution?’ page, by the look of it. Clearly they haven’t got what this blog is up to, have they?
So the answer to this query and to any other institution that would like to similarly co-opt my blog for their marketing strategies at any point in the future is: yes I bloody well would mind. It’s my website and I choose what webpages I link to and exactly what text I’m going to put in the links. I am not here to provide you with free advertising.
My blog, my words.
4 comments on “Whose blog is this anyway?”
Amen.
I had a similar email where the change would have rendered the sentence nonsense. I said I was keeping the text but offered to remove the link.
Yeah, it would have done that too, which just added insult to injury. I might not have been quite so irritated if it looked as though some thought had gone into the request… I did think about suggesting that if they’d prefer, I could remove any links to the site, but the email I sent probably got the message across anyway. (I also thought about writing direct to the institution to ask them why they’d employed such an inept marketing firm.)
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