Welp, it’s beginning to look like blog carnivals are dead. Too bad…out of style, maybe?
I’ve kind of given up on the Carnival of Personal Finance: so many posts are rejected that I figure I’ve been blackballed there, for reasons probably related to my left-wing politics. That’s OK — it’s a host’s prerogative to be unfair, and if they want to do that, I don’t begrudge them.
So this week I sent posts to four other carnivals, through Blog Carnival HQ, a site that aggregates submission forms to these things. Tried for the Carnival of Retirement, the Lifestyle Carnival, the Carnival of Financial Independence, and the Yakezie Carnival, all of which were scheduled between the 21st and the 24th of February.
Not one single carnival went live!
Presumably the listed hosts either forgot they were supposed to run the carnivals or had something better to do.
Annoying. It’s kind of time-consuming to submit posts to these things, even though Blog Carnival HQ makes it simpler than it used to be.
And too bad. It was a handy way to get a little link juice and, as a host, to perform a small service for the blogging community. Oh well.
Nothing lasts forever.
They may be considered “negative SEO,” according to this post:
http://www.thatedeguy.com/2014/01/blog-carnivals-negative-seo/
Good grief!
You think this stuff is true? If so, I suppose one should go through and delete all those old Carnival posts…of which FaM has a-plenty. I’ll have to do some research on this.
Yes, the tide has definitely seemed to turn on carnivals. I’ve removed all the ones I hosted from my site and have been asking other blog owners to remove my links.
There are 7 pages of carnivals and “moments of fame” links on my site. LOL! Funny has published over 2200 posts, quite of few of them carnivals. And back in the day, I used to submit a fistful of posts to several carnivals every week! Wouldn’t even know where to begin to ask people to delete links.
Jesse (Web guru) says carnivals are now disapproved by the Big Brother of the Web. Personally, I could do without some corporation dictating my content — it’s not like we’re posting pictures of nekkid nubiles here. Besides generating link juice, the carnivals served a useful purpose: often you’d find a new-to-you site that was interesting, entertaining, and well written.
On the other hand, I will say those things were ridiculously time-consuming and tedious to put together. And submitting half-a-dozen posts a week could soak up the time, too. Happy to do without it, but would like some substitute for building links and discovering new sites.
I wonder if blogging itself is going away. The dictatorial pressure and threats from Google do take the fun out of it. Eventually there’ll be no point in writing blogs just for the heck of it or to create a kind of one-person periodical; the only reason to blog will be to advertise a product or service.
Too bad.
I think they have become less popular b/c people stopped manually approving them. When you and I both started I actually liked discovering links from other bloggers, now they are filled with spam
Yeah, I really dislike that piece of code. It does tend to make the whole carnival look spammy, as it’s painfully obvious the host hasn’t read most of the entries.
And without the host introducing and commenting on each accepted entry, you end up with what’s effectively a list of links, excruciatingly boring to look at and impenetrably opaque.
And the last couple of times I’ve hosted, yes indeedies: the in-box had plenty of obvious spam from sites that were not blogs but businesses trying to shill services and products. Also annoying were the number of chuckleheads who would send multiple submissions…like you’ve got nothing else to do but fiddle with several of their emissions. Whenever I’d notice that, I’d reject everything they submitted.
So yeah, I guess they have become problematic. It’s too bad.
I did like looking at blog carnivals to a certain extent because I often discovered new blogs that way. However, several of the blog carnivals out there (not yours FaM) seemed not to curate the content in any way. I started to think that carnivals were just ways people got their blog entries listed on other blogs, and I no longer found them that interesting. Maybe I wasn’t the only person thinking that way.