Please add my blog to Drupal Planet

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.

I removed the feed again for making not verifiable claims abut themselves in http://volacci.com/blog/ben-finklea/2009/june/18/drupal’s-competition-stiffens-wordpress-28

Gerhard,
I respect the need for quality posts on Planet Drupal. As such, I was wondering if you would be more specific about which part of that post makes not verifiable claims about Volacci so that I can address it. I think the only claim we make is our closing statement: “Volacci is the leading Drupal SEO company and very passionate about your online success. By the end of your contract you will have at least as much additional business from your web site as you spend on our services... or we'll work for free until you do.”

“Volacci is the leading Drupal SEO company” - I don't know of any other company is exclusively Drupal SEO. In Acquia's partner program, we are the only SEO company listed. (There is one or two others who mention SEO in passing but they are primarily development companies, not SEO companies.) If you'll look back at Drupalcon DC, Design for Drupal in Boston, Drupalcamp Colorado, etc., I think you'll find that we're the only SEO company sponsoring those events and I gave or participated in the only SEO-related sessions. Ditto (so far) for Paris. While there is not a list of Drupal SEO companies, if there was one, it is my guess that we would be the only company listed or at least at the top of the list. That will not always be the case, of course, but at least for now, it seems to be.

”and very passionate about your online success“ - Ask any of our clients. I'd be happy to provide you a list of references.

“By the end of your contract you will have at least as much additional business from your web site as you spend on our services... or we'll work for free until you do.” - That's our guarantee. While we don't have many clients who have not achieved this, I do have 1 that you could talk to. And we did work for free for them and they did eventually achieve the profits they needed. We absolutely fulfill our guarantee. 97% of the time it's because they achieved the profit goals within 12 months.

If there was something else, please let me know. My goal is to be 100% transparent and forthright.

Thanks,

--Ben

I take exception on:

“Volacci is /the/ leading Drupal SEO company"

This is not verifyable at all. You'd get into a lot of legal trouble over here with your competitors over such claims.

I also take exception on SEO being offered with Drupal (and SEO in general), but this is unrelated.

http://www.contrast.ie/blog/seo-is-bullshit/
http://www.contrast.ie/blog/seo-is-still-bullshit/

It sounds like the concern here is not about the content of Ben's posts, but the language used in the boilerplate copy at the end of each post. If Ben were to agree to not include that paragraph in the feed itself (so it could only be seen by people who click on the "read more" link), or else change the language to something less objectionable (perhaps "*a* leading Drupal SEO company") would that be more acceptable?

Thanks, George. I'm amenable to your suggestion. Gerhard?

I agree that the boilerplate text is rather obnoxious and unconventional for Drupal Planet. Build your company's reputation via the quality of your content, and people will naturally click into your site to read more about who you are and what you do.

As long as that's either removed or "below the fold" on future posts in the feed, I don't have a problem with them being reinstated, and I believe that addresses Gerhard's concerns as well.

Thanks, Angie. I'm willing to put it below the fold. Do I simply do that with the Split summary at cursor button or is there something else I need to do?

Any suggestions to improve my writing are greatly appreciated. What's obnoxious about it? The claim at being THE company or something else?

Is the quality of my posts lower than the norm? Again, any suggestions would be very helpful.

Any suggestions to improve my writing are greatly appreciated. What's obnoxious about it? The claim at being THE company or something else?

For me, it's mostly mixing in the content of the post with both unrelated and blatant advertising.

There are certainly posts on the Planet right at this moment that contain advertising; for example, pingVision mentions that they presented and sponsored Drupalcamp Colorado, and Lullabot cross-links products in an article about choosing Ubercart over Shopify. But the difference here is that:

a) The advertising is *directly related* to the content. Talking about the products you sell when you're talking about how you switched e-commerce platforms is on-topic. Volacci being the leading Drupal SEO company has nothing to do with WordPress 2.8 coming out.
b) There is no "boilerplate" advertisement text on every single post from these companies. Rest assured, if every Lullabot blog post ended with something like, "Lullabot is the leading Drupal education company, who produces world-class articles, podcasts, workshops, and Drupal books," there would be the exact same outcry.

So my advice would be to change your approach a bit, and focus on writing lots of quality articles about SEO topics, which will naturally cement your company's name in peoples' heads when they think about Drupal and SEO. When it's on-topic to the content, feel free to mention stuff your company has specifically done, like pingVision did in mentioning they sponsored Drupalcamp Colorado in a post about Drupalcamp Colorado. Just don't stick boilerplate advertising in, because that reads too much like "banner ads" in something that's supposed to be a community-driven educational/news resource.

As for how to remove the boilerplate text from the feed, I'm not really sure. It seems like your teaser break is well above that, since http://volacci.com/blog/ben-finklea only shows about a paragraph of text. The only thing I can think of is adding a block on your website below the content area with the boilerplate text that shows up on all node pages. This would remove it from the feed's content, but keep it visually in the site for your visitors. Another option I guess is to change your RSS settings so that only the teaser version of articles are sent to the Planet, which would hide the entire latter part of the article, including the advertising.

Once either of those changes are made, I don't have a problem adding it back to Drupal Planet again, unless Gerhard strongly objects.

That makes perfect sense. I didn't realize that A) people saw it every time we posted (I don't read my own blog posts on Drupal planet - lesson learned) or B) that they see it as a banner ad-like advertisement. Ew.

The boilerplate will not appear on any future blog posts. If I do include it on my site, it will not be in the text of the post but in a block or other on-page only element as you suggested. Check out today's post: http://volacci.com/search-engine-optimization-master-of-search for verification.

Thank you again. This was tremendous.

--Ben

Thanks Ben for being flexible to work with this and get this resolved. I agreed that the boilerplate text was a little annoying, especially to us that subscribe to the Planet feeds. Using the content or below-content block for this text is a perfect use case for this!

Ok, great. Confirmed the latest post does not have the boilerplate ads, so re-added http://volacci.com/drupal-planet/feed back to Planet as "Ben's SEO Blog" as requested in the initial post. Please re-open if you want this changed.

Thanks a lot, Ben! :)

Thank you all very much!