Forum

Thanks for your New Year's wishes Breadcrumbs - Happy New Year to you too.

We have approached many bloggers offering them the chance to index their own blogs if we are not likely to get to their blog ourselves soon.  Some (just a few) have expressed interest in doing so and of those only two have completed it.  Some have given up and some are persevering (very slowly).  We would love for more bloggers to do so - as you say, it introduces their blog to a whole new audience and drives traffic back to their blog.

Even more inexplicable than bloggers not wanting to index their own blog are that two blogs so far have said they don't want their blog indexed by EYB, even though we were doing all the work (at great expense!).  Now that really is strange - someone offers to create an index of the recipes on your blog and drives traffic to you and you don't have to do a thing or pay a cent but you say no?  Weird!

Our primary focus is still very much cookbooks and many new books are being indexed every week. We are also indexing 28 different magazines every month (as well as working our way through the archive for some of them).  If you check the Library books tab you will see new books are added every day.

That's great that you've offered bloggers the opportunity to index their blogs Jane and entirely baffling why any blogger would decline the opportunity to have their recipes indexed.  I know some bloggers "adapt" the recipes of others so I wonder if they're concerned about that?  

I wonder if folks who are requesting blogs to be indexed are aware that their blogger has declined having their blog indexed or, has the opportunity to index their blog here?  In either case, EYB members could encourage bloggers to join our community and, index their blog to increase the reach of their blog, make it more accessible and gain exposure to a whole new audience.  I wonder if it's worth doing one of your feature articles (that scroll across the Home page)....?

Apologies Breadcrumbs for the delay in my reply.  We are equally baffled as to why any blogger would not want their blog indexed - it costs them nothing and drives traffic to their blog.  It makes you wonder why they blog in the first place??

We did ask everyone who had requested one of the blogs to contact the blogger and explain why an EYB index was useful to them but it didn't make any difference.

We also contact every blogger that we promote on Facebook and Twiiter but again very little response.  I think for many bloggers this is a hobby and they either don't have the time to respond to emails or they get so many that they ignore any that are not from readers.  Not sure which it is.  It certainly would help us if EYB members contact their favorite bloggers and recommend they get indexed on EYB.  It is also a great help if members post about EYB (where it's relevant) in comments and on discussion boards.  This can really increase our exposure, especially on big name blogs.

That would be great lorloff - she should contact us at [email protected].  We have had a couple of bloggers index their own blogs so far and there are a few more in progress.  Being indexed on EYB would definitely increase exposure for her blog recipes - our online recipes get a huge amount of traffic every day since anyone can access those, you don't need to be an EYB member.  We also promote online recipes through Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

Again, I am surprised that more bloggers don't see this benefit.  But as I said before, I think many blogs are not run as a business, just a hobby and driving traffic isn't their priority.

Are the recipes from The Kitchn indexed by that site's staff, or by EYB?  I wondered because there seems to be an unusually long lag between posting there and indexing here -- close to two months at this point. 

My apologies for that ellabee -- I'm currently working through a backlog of blog recipes that has accumulated and am getting them back up to date one at a time. The Kitchn is actually the one I was planning to work on next, so you should be seeing the missing recipes show up shortly.

Thanks, Christine!  The fall - holiday onslaught of new books and recipes seems to get more staggering every year.