Felix Salmon of Reuters writes about a concern he has with companies being able to post information on the Forbes blog system.
Salmon writes, “But while I was on the site, I clicked around a little bit, and soon stumbled across this post. ‘The Best Rewards Credit Cards For Your Lifestyle’ is the headline, but look closely at those hyperlinks. Common search-engine phrases like ‘rewards credit card,’ ‘airline credit card,’ ‘hotel credit card’ and others are linked to just one site, cardhub.com. Altogether the post contains seven links, and all of them point to Cardhub.
“Nowhere on the post is there any indication that the author of the post, Odysseas Papadimitriou, is the CEO of Cardhub. But he’s managed to convert an editorial blog — not an AdVoice blog — into a massive advertisement for his own company, complete with lots of highly valuable SEO links.
“That’s not ‘knowledgeable and credible content creators can providing information and perspective and connecting with one another,’ it’s advertising and marketing. And it emphatically is not ‘totally transparent,’ nor is the marketer in question ‘clearly identified, delineated and labeled.’
“Even if the AdVoice blogs are acceptable, then, Forbes.com as a whole seems to be very comfortable transgressing ethical lines with its blogs. I wouldn’t trust anything there to be what it seems.”
Read more here.
