Pink grenade : how Viktor&Rolf Bonbon (flower)bombed my search for myself

Source: Soundcloud

 

It's Valentine's Day again... regular readers know better than to come to Bonkers looking for inspiration on the Ten Best Rose Perfumes to give your loved one, or anything else of that predictable romantic ilk. Which is not to say that I haven't written posts in the past tailored to this (sadly increasingly commercial) occasion - several may come up in this link - but the post that popped into my head to write this morning is more pink in its inspiration than the classic deep red of rose and heart motifs...

For at the weekend a friend in the US sent me a link to a Luxe magazine article; it lists the "37 Best Perfumes for Women", with the byline: "Find your signature scent". You can immediately tell that this piece was aimed at a mainstream audience, for perfumistas prefer to own fragrance wardrobes, on the basis that "more is more". Anyway, each of the 37 perfumes listed had won a separate category, which included "Best Luxury", "Best value", "Best floral", "Best for night", "Best as gift" (another notion we don't hold with, unless the person has specifically requested said scent as a gift!), "Best over 50" (Dior J'adore- pardon?!?), "Best for young", and so on and so forth in that reductionist and inevitably doomed pigeonholing vein. FYI, Black Opium was "Best for night", which says it all right there. And how Byredo Bal d'Afrique could take the prize for "Best earthy" beats me. Where is the oakmoss and patchouli? And right at the top of the list was the perfume deemed "Most popular"- or should that be "Best popular" for the sake of consistency? - namely Viktor&Rolf Flowerbomb.

Seeing this accolade awarded to Flowerbomb fired me up with indignation, which may have coloured my reply to the friend:

"Ah, that list had more of a 'designer' bias than the niche perfumes I am mostly into, and when that happens I always wonder if the perfume house has chucked them a load of money to promote their product. I say this, because Viktor&Rolf gets a mention, and if I do an Internet search for my blog - Bonkers about Perfume - up comes a load of images of V&R bottles as the first result, even though that clearly has zilch to do with the search terms. So I tend to completely disregard 'Best of' lists in women's magazines, sorry!"

 

 

 

I may have been a bit harsh there, but I have been really exercised by the monotonous regularity with which Bonbon ads bombard the search results for the blog, the butterfly-shaped bottle serving as an additional taunt, in view of my online "flittersniffer" identity. It doesn't happen with any search engine, mind - just on Microsoft Bing, which I have on my netbook. Google has no ads, whether accessed through my Firefox browser (desktop PC) or Chrome (phone). I spend most time on my netbook though, so the pink-winged bottles will continue to torment! Do let me know if you use Yahoo or any other search engine (eg Duckduckgo?), and get ads as the first search result.

 

I would also be interested to know whether you would assume that Flowerbomb really is "the most popular perfume" through its own merits, or whether a massive marketing budget has managed to lob it front and centre of consumer consciousness, like a great big pink grenade on a mercenary mission. And I don't necessarily even mean by greasing reviewers' palms with silver - which is mere supposition on my part, after all - it could be by aggressive in-store promo campaigns, or saturated magazine advertising, or SEO-jiggery pokery, or any other kind of above or below-the-line spending.

Anyway...I guess I got myself a bit worked up - more over the nefarious power of brands to buy exposure and/or influence than the mere fact of my blog not having the prominence you would expect for an exact match of the search phrase. Tomorrow I will sally forth as is customary, and hoover up any out of date Valentine's bargains I spy in the form of flowers or foodstuffs. I would say "in a therapeutic act of 'self-care'", but I have come to dislike the expression "self-care" every bit as much as "uptick", "put food on the table", and "baked in". "Baked in" being my newest and most irritating mot du jour - usually used in connection with Boris's character flaws rather than to denote the inclusion of dried fruit in a cake. That's assuming you have the funds to put the ingredients for food on the table.

Then tonight I am off for a girls' night in with two friends. As an offering I am taking a large jar of Sauerkraut, a partly used bottle of magnesium tablets, and a small hot water bottle cover I knitted for the hostess's son's puppy**. Oh, come to think of it - that is red (though it looks more like "hot pink" in this photo, haha).

Happy Valentine's Day, however you are spending it!

 

**NB The hostess and I do have a long and honourable tradition of unconventional present exchanges - packets of quinoa, half bars of chocolate, open bottles of wine and life-limited fruit have also featured.

Me, myself, Instagram, and a summer of droppings and (unrelated!) broken things

"Hercules against the Hydra" ~ via Wikimedia Commons (Wolfgang Sauber)

Goodness, it is has been over a month since I wrote my last post. That doesn't surprise me though, for I have been besieged, beset, and beleaguered by a legion of problems, of which more anon (including the more amusing ones!).

But first a word on social media. I have historically been a Facebook fan through and through...well, not an unconditional one, I should add, as there is much that is wrong with Facebook, and I don't just mean the constant slew of ads for slimming hose and relaxed fit slacks. I never really took to the bitty bearpit that is Twitter, or the soothing aesthetics of Instagram, where beautifully shot images drift by like cumulus clouds. Beyond that, for a long time I had a downer on the hashtags that are such an integral part now of the virtual landscape. Their messy, spiky aspect upset me, especially when posters used a vast thicket of them, including hashtags in foreign languages. This struck me as the acme - nay, nadir! - of SEO savvy, but then I don't like pushiness and self-promotion in any guise, and struggle to embrace it myself, even though it is very much the modern way. For if you don't take active steps to climb out of the Google sandbox, you will never be heard in the chorus - some might say babble - of Internet voices.

And I don't know how it came about exactly that I started to gravitate towards Instagram after all...I may partly have been propelled into its arms by the increasingly strident tone of Facebook, the ramping up of its adverts, or the depressing snippets of news which cannot fail to catch your eye at every turn: Brexit, climate change, factory farming, pop stars dying before their time. Instagram is a languorous oasis of sensory delight by comparison, albeit peppered with the offending hashtags. I continued to wrestle with the concept of these, trying to see them merely as labels on the drawers of a cyber filing cabinet, and not as so many mini-portcullises, bordering on medieval instruments of mental torture. You can tell that I have a serious aversion to the things, bordering on hashtagophobia!

#croissantmutant

But gradually I came to enjoy picking out photos to upload onto Instagram - I steadfastly refuse to call it 'Insta', mind, for that way lies 'nom nom nom' and 'sleeps' (shudders). I even got to the point of having fun with the hashtags, occasionally running with ones that had no precedent on the Interwebs - hashtag neologisms, if you will. It surprises me that I was the first to coin #catmustbecateredfor, and there are only four other posts under #croissantmutant. That is worth checking out actually, for the one that looks like a ram in particular!

And then there are all the filters to play with, like some kind of instant colouring game(!) - a new toy for me, would you believe? - albeit I quite often end up posting pictures simply as nature intended.

If you would like to check out my page - which is embarrassingly light on perfume-related imagery, though I plan to rectify that by and by - I am flittersniffer on there. Just noticed how many 'glittersniffer's there are, but there's only one of me. What even is a 'glittersniffer'? Though didn't there used to be a perfume with gold bits in it?...hold on, at least one version of Donna Karan Gold and a JPG is also coming vaguely back to me. I am betting that they don't mean that though.

Okay, so a brief word on the summer of droppings and broken things - those would be flea and mouse droppings, not things that have been dropped, in case of any confusion. The poor birds don't last long enough in the house to leave any such calling card, plus it is ten mice for every bird 'present', to be fair. Yes, it has been a rum old time lately, with typically between four and five things going wrong every single day. Today so far there has only been 'a bad night's sleep' and 'a big fat dead mouse', so a good day really by recent standards. Though my eye eczema - complete with distinctly unfetching atopic pleats (you really don't want to know) - is back with a vengeance, and making blinking uncomfortable. (It counts towards yesterday's tally.)

"No idea how it got in, mum."

Here is a smattering - and splattering! - of recent mishaps and problems, to give you an idea of why I have been missing in action as far as blogging is concerned, though I have been inordinately busy in a firefighting / Hydra head chopping / Whack-a-mole sense. There was an equally lengthy selection in France, but one set is enough!

• Throwing up headache for two days (three times)
• Toner cartridge splatter painted a pale carpet
• Suitcase wheel mysteriously self-destructed
• Mouse droppings all round the perimeter of the living room
• Unidentified droppings on all hinges of the pantry
• Cat has ongoing flea issue
• I have itchy red lumps - praying they are mosquito bites, being more socially acceptable
• Found a bed bug casing, which I have convinced myself is historic (to avoid going mad)
• Patio has suddenly sported / sprouted? both white and green lichen!
• Phone malfunction - batteries found to be a crystalline corroded mess
• Splashed a radio with chilli con carne, now permanently stained auburn, and tacky to touch
• Bought a second hand set of drawers which will cost three times as much to fix than I paid for them (Moral of the story: buyer beware - of Photoshop!).
• Bought a pair of trainers before realising they were two different colours
• Accidentally sent my hole puncher and stapler to France
• No sooner had I repaired one silk curtain that had perished and sheared, when I noticed that the other one has gone the same way.
• Treated alleged water marks on a second hand table with oxalic acid - quite a H & S-conscious undertaking, I might add - only to discover the marks are metal - from some piece of industrial machinery that had been sitting on it. Procedure declared a resounding failure, and meanwhile have inadvertently bleached my drive (not pictured).

I will return with 'normal' blog posts though, once things have calmed down. I would like to review a new perfume from Swindon(!) for example, and more besides - but first I sense there may be a few more Hydra heads to chop and moles to whack...!

UPDATE: I have just remembered that there was another trigger for taking up with Instagram again...I managed to fix my broken blog link in the bio after several hours of deep Googling - turned out it lacked a security certificate in the format it was in, plus for some strange reason the 'www' part of the name was causing an issue, so I took that off. So there's another example of a broken thing I managed to fix!

The top 50 (websites and) perfume blogs according to Feedspot: a blogger / market researcher's view

Charlie Bonkers, a capital cat

A few weeks ago I was contacted out of the blue by a chap in San Francisco, though I didn't clock his location at the time. It will later turn out to be significant in this story though.

"My name is Anuj Agarwal. I'm Founder of Feedspot.

I would like to personally congratulate you as your blog Bonkers about Perfume has been selected by our panelist as one of the Top 50 Perfume Blogs on the web.

I personally give you a high-five and want to thank you for your contribution to this world. This is the most comprehensive list of Top 50 Perfume Blogs on the internet and I'm honored to have you as part of this.

Also, you have the honor of displaying the following badge on your blog. Use the below code to display the badge proudly on your blog."

He inserted a link to the Feedspot site in the body of the email - you can find it here.

Well, there was much to puzzle over in this email, even before I studied the list in more detail. Does he really only have one panelist compiling these rankings? Isn't three a minimum quorum of judges in these sorts of things? And isn't a "comprehensive list of Top 50" anything a contradiction in terms? To my mind, the word 'comprehensive' inherently suggests all-inclusion, rather than a subset of something.

Tree top Truffle

But hey, these are minor hair-splitting points compared to what I went on to find on checking out the list. I appeared at # 41, which is perhaps surprising given my near total disregard for all matters SEO-related, but as you will see I wonder if I should even have been in the Top 50 at all...

The first thing that struck me about the list was that although many of the big behemoths of perfume blogging - old and new - were present and correct, and highly ranked as I would expect: Now Smell This, Bois de Jasmin, Cafleurebon,The Candy Perfume Boy, The Scented Salamander, Perfume Posse etc, there were a number of key blogs missing, while a whole slew of 'other entities' had been included, which are not what I would call blogs as such.

For starters there was Reddit, which I understand to be another social content aggregator site just like the one this chap is seeking to compile!

Then there were various retail chains that came pretty high up the list, such as The Perfume Shop, and Perfume.com and Perfume Click. On closer inspection, it turns out that their websites do in fact have a blog attached, but more in the way a motorcycle might have a sidecar, or I might wear an earring. I can't believe the retailers' blogs have all that traffic in their own right, though I can well believe that the sites overall do, as they are online shops! But I could be wrong - because I am judging things only from the perspective of the perfume blogosphere as I know it, not ALL internet writing on perfume.

Pillar puss surveying the blown over fence

Then Basenotes was in there, which is not a standalone blog either, but it IS an absolute core perfume website in our world. But in that case where oh where was Fragrantica??!! Or Osmoz, on which I cut my fragrance family teeth back in the day, if we are going to get a bit fluid with our categories.

And the anomalies kept coming. There was a site featured called The Perfume Expert which may well be huge, though I had never heard of it, and which also covered makeup. Which is fair enough, but if we are including make up, surely The Non-Blonde should be in there too? And Get Lippie, who will shortly be on our TV screens!

Kafkaesque was on the list, though she has been on hiatus since the end of last year. So if dormant blogs can be included, why not the gigantically rich archive that is Olfactoria's Travels? And where is Katie Puckrik Smells and Grain de Musc!?!?!

And there were also a number of perfume houses in there, such as Eurofragrance, Tijon Fragrance Lab & Boutique, and All Good Scents (an Indian brand). I may be remiss for not having heard of all of them. Though good old Andy Tauer also featured at #16: he is one of a number of perfumers like Roxana Illuminated Perfume (ranked #25) and Ayala Moriel with her Smellyblog (ranked #28), whose blogs are very much a key feature of their overall online presence.

Oh, and I spied an entry for a product called FragranceLock, a 'perfume setting spray' of all improbable things:

"...a new fragrance finishing spray that gives your fragrance longer lasting staying power, leaves a breathable mesh on the skin decelerating fragrance's natural evaporation cycle making fragrance last longer".

And that came in one notch after Undina's Looking Glass, and ahead of Perfume Shrine. Eh??

More tops of fixtures to conquer

And if we are going to be modern about all this, why not include the video blogs? - Katie Puckrik's YouTube channel and the new vlogs on the block, We Love to Smell and Fume Chat, being clear contenders for inclusion.

So of course me being me, I had to write to Anuj and point out to him a) that some of these sites were not blogs per se, b) that there were all sorts of notable omissions and c) that I post once a week, not once a month(!). I am not overly bothered if that affected my ranking or not, but if I see a mistake I have to correct it, obviously. ;)

And given my conviction that some at least of the missing blogs would have made it into the Top 50 - especially if Feedspot ditched some of the shops and 'other entities' - I asked how many Anuj had come up with in total. I haven't done the exercise, but have a hunch that if you were to take the combined blog rolls of a dozen perfume bloggers or so - even selected at random - you would probably generate another 30+ names, who could at least be put through the screening process to see if they might have made the cut.

Anuj replied:

"Overall we found Top 50 Perfume blog."

So there you have it. It's not the Top 50 Perfume Blogs, but all the perfume blogs he found...

Moving on to how the blogs are ranked, the criteria are stated as follows:

• Google reputation and Google search ranking
• Influence and popularity on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites
• Quality and consistency of posts
• Feedspot's editorial team and expert review

'And while I am on the wardrobe, here's another thing...!'

On Feedspot itself, each site's Alexa ranking is mentioned, but not its Google page ranking, which I do think is an important complementary yardstick, but maybe it is factored in. Hell will freeze over before I install an Alexa toolbar. Then I see that I am listed as having no Facebook presence: while it is true that I have no page specifically for the blog, I do publish links to all my posts under my own name, so they are potentially seen by upwards of 700 friends on there all the same. I decided against having a dedicated Bonkers presence on Facebook because I truly can't be bothered to repeat my blog post updates in two places. But hey, I am someone who never ever has a party in case nobody comes, so go figure.

So there are SEO factors that are more tangible, if you will - though I believe even Alexa rankings are based on estimates where blogs don't have the toolbar installed?- but of particular interest to me were the last two criteria. I wondered who the Feedspot editorial team are exactly. Maybe Anuj has a particular interest in perfume. Certainly Feedspot are not perfume specialists. You will find lists of the Best Bag blogs, the Best Recycling blogs, Lupus blogs, Lyme Disease blogs, Melanoma blogs, Divorce blogs, Feng Shui blogs and many, many more.

And I may have had a bit of influence on the list as well, for if my memory is not playing tricks, Feedspot seem to have quietly amended their title to "The top 50 Perfume Websites and Blogs", whereas I  am sure it was originally just "blogs". Hence why I went off on one to them! ;)

And if you leave aside my quibbles about the rights and wrongs of the rankings, it may well be dead handy for readers to use these consolidated 'RSS reader sites' as a way of accessing their favourite blogs. I would be interested to know if that is so, or how you follow / read the blogs you like.

Here's the badge I have not added

Meanwhile, I have no plans to display the badge, mind, proudly or otherwise. Also because I don't take kindly to being 'badge-ered' to do things.

"Hi Vanessa,

I emailed regarding your blog Bonkers about Perfume which was selected by Feedspot as one of the Top 50 Perfume Blogs on the web.

Can you help us spread the word by adding the badge on your blog.

If you can briefly mentioned about the Top 50 Perfume Blogs list in any of your upcoming post, we would greatly appreciate it."

Well, I did do that! 

Attack Of The Clones: Bonkers Sees Doubly Red In A Battle With Content Scrapers

This has not been a good weekend. For starters, I unintentionally aquired an orange thatch in place of hair. It was relatively cheap as thatching goes (with it being a dying art of course), but that was no consolation. Plus I failed to sleep, failed to edge the lawn, do a food shop, polish my shoes, or catch up on back episodes of Corrie. In short, most of the household chores and pleasurable activities I had set out to accomplish this weekend went by the board. This is because I was preoccupied by the sudden discovery that a month’s worth of past posts on Bonkers had been hijacked by Israeli terrorists - or by a Tel Aviv-based "content scraper site" (to give it its proper name) – posing as a harmless RSS index directory. Yup, I had been cloned.

Now my blog is already listed on a number of “aggregator” or directory sites like Tree Hugger or Day Life, and I have no problem with any of those. On such sites just the title and a bitesize taster of your post will typically be shown. Readers have to click on the link below - which will say something like: “Full article on (Site Name)” – if they wish to carry on reading, whereupon they are routed back to the original blog post. Thanks to this “titbit”-quoting approach, RSS feed sites are no threat at all to blog owners, and may well serve as additional sources of referred traffic.

As ever, Wikipedia helpfully explains this other, bothersome phenomenon of "content" or "web scraping" – and no, I am not scraping stuff from Wikipedia, just quoting a little bit of it:

“A scraper site is a spam website that copies all of its content from other websites using web scraping.”

One more sentence if the Wikipedia authors don’t mind, and then I am done.

“Some scraper sites are created to make money by using advertising programs.”

Too right they are! Yes, this one plonked my posts up on its site, hedged them all around with Google ads, and then sat back and watched as the revenue poured in...or maybe just trickled in, one small monetised drop at a time - who knows? Hey, it is the principle I object to, the piggybacking on someone else's time and effort in the hope of financial gain.

So I fired off a pretty stern email to the site owner, in which I came over all UPPER CASE, WHICH IS NOT LIKE ME AT ALL. I will, however, reproduce my complaint in normal text, to preempt mass eyestrain on the part of readers:

“Please take down all content from my blog, Bonkers about Perfume - you have
basically stolen my blog in its entirety for your own purposes and I will
pursue the matter further if you do not remove it from your site
immediately.”

To the site owner’s credit, he responded pretty promptly, asking me for my blog domain name and following this up with further inquiries about the exact web URL of the content I had a problem with. That said, in amongst our flurry of exchanges he couldn’t resist a defensive side swipe:

“And tobe clear we are only rss index directory (no scraping).”

And to be clear, if the lifting wholesale of material, including text and images, does not constitute scraping, I sincerely hope never to encounter a bona fide content scraper in a dark alley.

So anyway, by the end of the afternoon my blog content had been excised from the rogue site – scraped off, no less - though not without the site owner pointing out how I was in fact cutting off my SEO nose to spite my face:

“FYI to be in out site it is good for you SEO & traffice wise but it is no longer relevant for you…”

Note the suspenseful dots pointing to my ill-judged decision….

Well, as it happens, having checked them out, the content scraper’s site doesn’t appear to register on Google’s page rank scale of 0-10 whereas Bonkers is a 3, ie "off the starting blocks", you could say. (For anyone not familiar with this techie blog rating malarkey, Google page ranking is one key measure of a blog’s importance in cyberspace - for more on this see point 4 of my recent post on blogging here. So I fail to see why my ranking would be improved by an association with an unranked site, or for that matter why I would get any referred traffic to speak of, given that entire blog posts of mine were available for people to read over on the scraper site!

Not long after I sent my first tetchy email, something prompted me to click on a link on the scraper site that had previously led to my post on the Perfume Lovers London “Leather Event”; in its place I found a large chunk of what I took to be Hebrew, but at least the Bonkers blog content was gone. My thoughts immediately turned to Ari of Scents of Self, our go-to “in-perfume-community” Hebrew speaker, so I sent her the text and asked if she could confirm it was in fact Hebrew, and if so, whether she could kindly find a moment to tell me the gist. Ari was keen to help, but finding herself unfamiliar with some of the “Internet-y” terminology, she had the bright idea of running the text through Google Translate, and came up with the following:

"There is not even one character of copied content on this site. Display pages are a type of display window that broadcasts RSS within the online conversion of standard RSS to a display state that a web surfer is able to browse. And that every change that occurred in the original broadcast (feed) varies respectively in our website online. The donor site publishers with the broadcast channels are promoting Google and directing visitors. If you still want us to remove the display page of your transmission source, please contact us through the button "contact" and send us the download link."

So they would be the donor site publisher, I take it? Funny that I should feel as though I am the (unwitting) donor in all this...like those bodies harvested for organs without the prior permission of the deceased or their next of kin. And as for this business of "displaying" as opposed to "scraping", well, that is a nice point of semantics. That would also mean that pubs which screen Sky TV football matches using foreign satellite decoders are also merely "displaying" the games, rather than filching them in any more reprehensible manner.

And I find it interesting that this rather pat defensive statement should have appeared where my post had been, instead of being written in an email directly to me. I wouldn't be surprised if this was stock copy the site has got ready to bang in whenever it suddenly incurred a textual hole, as another disgruntled blog owner reclaims their material as their own.

Well, what have I learnt from this unsettling incident? Firstly, that it really does pay to make a direct approach in the first instance to the site which has copied your material, as this avoids having to seek out alternative avenues of complaint that may lie deep within the bowels of Google or Blogger. I also found out that fellow blogger My Perfume Life is being scammed in exactly the same way, and have dropped her a line to this effect. And I have proved once more that I can call upon friends in Perfume Land – even on a "sudden death" basis - for help on all manner of random topics. : - )

Lastly, I learnt (for the umpteenth time!) never to write a post on Blogspot software, even though it supposedly saves drafts as you go along. Beastly Blogger contrived to eat this post completely - or, you could say, to scratch it off the "compose" window with a single gouge of its heartless fingernails - just as I was doing a final proof. Which rather begs the question:

“Where’s the blinkin' duplicate post when you really need one?!”


And I would be interested to know if anyone else out there is aware of having been cloned, scammed or scraped in a similar fashion?

If so, did you take any action against the scrapers, or did you decide to go with the outflow? : - )


Since writing this account of my own experience, Tarleisio of The Alembicated Genie has written a powerful and moving post on the subject of content theft - see link below:

Phantoms in the Fumosphere


Photo of print scraper from drsmith7383 via Flickr CC, photo of boot scraper from sywlch via Flickr CC, other photos my own.