SEO blogs: Flattery will only get you so far

Hosting a blog carnival is a good way to keep tabs on the state of the blogosphere. Over my five plus years of writing the Health Business Blog I've hosted blog carnivals several times, including Grand Rounds, Health Wonk Review and Cavalcade of Risk. Maybe I'm wrong, but blog carnivals used to be a bigger deal, or at least a bigger driver of traffic. Five years ago just having an entry in a blog carnival would routinely yield hundreds of hits. When I hosted Grand Rounds for the first time I got 10,000 hits in one day compared to a typical range of a few hundred. That was a result of being mentioned by a big, mainstream blog. These days I barely notice a blip from being featured in most blog carnivals, and even when I host the numbers aren't staggering.Tomorrow I'm hosting the Health Wonk Review. Of the 40 submissions I received, 17 appear to be from search engine optimizers seeking to increase inbound links. A typical submission from a site advertising masters degrees in biotechnology contains a list of the Top 50 Biotechnology Blogs. I've received a lot of emails over the past year or so from people who write these blogs, telling me that the Health Business Blog has been named one of the top 50 health business and policy blogs or something like that. From time to time I've mentioned these lists on Twitter.What's interesting about these posts is that they are not spam in the traditional sense. Rather they contain some modestly interesting content and are designed in a way to get people to link to them. Nonetheless I'm not going to include them in tomorrow's edition.