You have a valid point about wine writing needing to be transparent if it is to gain/maintain credibility, but I would like to point out a confusion in this particular article
This is not wine PR or marketing. Most proper wine marketing or PR actually genuinely tries to be positive (believe it or not)
This is not wine brands trying to get better reviews of their wines.
It is actually about search engine optimisation (SEO). The content they will provide will be poor, I agree, but within it will be carefully crafted links with keywords that drive search engine results for their target site up the rankings.
They don't care about your readers, only about directing unsuspecting wine fans using search engines to their sites. This is not about getting content to your site but to theirs.
I completely agree that this is something we must all agree not to accept, whatever the pay-off. The losers are all those we care about - our readers, the wines we write about genuinely and our own 'brand'.
It is isn't PR, its SEO
You have a valid point about wine writing needing to be transparent if it is to gain/maintain credibility, but I would like to point out a confusion in this particular article
This is not wine PR or marketing. Most proper wine marketing or PR actually genuinely tries to be positive (believe it or not)
This is not wine brands trying to get better reviews of their wines.
It is actually about search engine optimisation (SEO). The content they will provide will be poor, I agree, but within it will be carefully crafted links with keywords that drive search engine results for their target site up the rankings.
They don't care about your readers, only about directing unsuspecting wine fans using search engines to their sites. This is not about getting content to your site but to theirs.
I completely agree that this is something we must all agree not to accept, whatever the pay-off. The losers are all those we care about - our readers, the wines we write about genuinely and our own 'brand'.