Worldtraveler1

Your edit to St. Augustine, Florida

Message posted on Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Please do not add commercial material to Wikipedia, as you did to St. Augustine, Florida and to seventeen other articles today. While objective prose about products or services is acceptable, Wikipedia is not intended to be a vehicle for advertising or promotion. This same domain has been involved in previous linkspam incidents, with the same misleading claim of being an "official" site. Please be aware that this behavior is not going to benefit your business in any way.-- Rob C. alias Alarob 16:26, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

ANSWER:

Stevie, you wrote that our website vacations2discover.com is not the official website, but it is. We are payed by the St. Augustine Convention and Visitors Bureau - so as all other clients where i posted the links. Please do not remove the links again.

Let me make this very clear to you. You are using our free website to profit. I don't care who is paying you, what you are doing is disgraceful. If this is how your company does search engine optimization, you should be ashamed, keeping this up will end up with your site on our blacklist, and I hear that google likes to check that list... —— Eagle101^{Need help?} 13:54, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Your edits to Jacksonville

Please do not add inappropriate external links to Wikipedia, as you did to Jacksonville. Wikipedia is not a mere directory of links, nor should it be used for advertising or promotion. Inappropriate links include (but are not limited to) links to personal web sites, links to web sites with which you are affiliated, and links that attract visitors to a web site or promote a product. See the external links guideline and spam policy for further explanations. Since Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, external links do not alter search engine rankings. If you feel the link should be added to the article, then please discuss it on the article's talk page rather than re-adding it. Thank you.

Note that conflict of interest is at play here, and I reiterate the fact that the website you are adding to numerous articles is not an official website for any particular city. María (críticame) 13:17, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

External links

Please immediately stop adding new external links to articles. It is considered external link spam and not permitted. Whether these are the "official" websites or not is not the question. Wikipedia is not a travel guide; it isn't necessary for every article on a location to link to a travel guide. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:31, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Links

Please do not spam links to articles. Before re-adding those links, please discuss the link at the article's talk pages. I'm really doubting that a .com site is the "official" site for government. Those tend to end in .gov. You are free to talk to me about this, but continued re-insertion of the links without talking them over with contributors will result in the link being blacklisted. Thanks. —— Eagle101^{Need help?} 13:32, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

ITI Marketing and "official" claims

Worldtraveler1, your claims of "official" status for your tourism websites seem to be based on your business' aspirations to be a B2B portal for the travel industry. Your websites contain no evidence of any attempt, even, to form relationships with governments or official tourism boards, but only with travel agents and tour operators.

All you have done is to include the word "Official" in the title of each localized website -- something any web author can do without obtaining permission from anyone. A critic may accuse you of using "official" as a weasel word, but we're not here to criticize your business practices. Caveat emptor.

We only have a problem when you link your sites from Wikipedia articles, especially when you tout them here as "official" information sources. You, either alone or with help, have been doing this for months now, to my personal knowledge.

If you keep it up, the best possible outcome for you is that your self-serving touts will slip through the cracks here and there, and your Google PageRank might creep upward at no cost to you. Wikipedia is designed to resist this kind of exploitation, but you might get lucky. You may also succeed in fooling some Wikipedia users into regarding your good-looking sites as "official" and hence definitive. These benefits will be temporary at best, as there are literally thousands of volunteers patrolling the Wikipedia site at all times for vandalism and spam.

On the other hand, the worst possible outcome is that your links will fail to raise your PageRank, that your domains will be blacklisted at Wikipedia, and that Google will use that information to actually lower your PageRank instead. There is also an outside chance that records of these disputes will have a deleterious effect on your business. Wikipedia editors are also tourism consumers.

A negative outcome seems far more likely. This is why I commented earlier that your activities are not helping your business in any way. So why not focus on actions that will actually benefit your business, instead of continually trying to manipulate Wikipedia? Unless you get a charge out of dishonest behavior, I don't see how this is helping you. -- Rob C. alias Alarob 16:17, 9 August 2007 (UTC)