Your travel blog

It is my understanding that we cannot put a link to our blog in a post. It is okay to have a link in your profile.

Ahh, I see. Thanks.

Proposing transactions or promoting your website, blog, hotel, restaurant, uncle's private tours in Istanbul, etc for financial gain, pumping traffic to your website, or other marketing intent is prohibited. No fake reviews.

It depends on the blog. As you can see from the rule above, you can link to a personal blog in a post as long as it's not done for financial gain. If the blog is to market your travel business, then it's not allowed.

I keep a personal blog when I travel that is just for family and friends to see my trip reports and photos, and plan to do it again with this upcoming trip. It's no different than posting a trip report - you're just linking to one.

Thanks for clarifying, Mardee.

I think if you put a link in a post that you may be sailing close to the wind, regardless. The Webmaster has a fairly heavy hand regarding personal links off site. You should be fine as long as it is not a commercial site putting a reference in your profile. You can put other stuff there too, like what you like or otherwise, where you have travelled, and most importantly some sort of reference to where you are, as you have done.

I guess the simple solution is to click into people's profile and see if they have a travel blog listed :)

Mardee, I tried to share the YouTube videos we made of our 3-week honeymoon trip a few years back and they were immediately removed. Our videos are not monetized in any way--like you, we make them for ourselves and our families to enjoy the memories. I would love if this rule had changed so that we could actually share things like this as I think people would enjoy seeing them, like OP mentioned!

@Rachael I wonder if they count sharing YouTube videos as ' pumping traffic to your website.' 😒 It's a shame.

Hi all, re links to blogs and YouTube videos, this is one of those situations were others -- the majority of links to blogs or YT videos if we allowed them -- have ruined it for those who would use it appropriately. Many blogs and YT channels are monetized or push you toward links that are monetized, and it's not something we can monitor nor do we have capacity to research and approve/disapprove such things on another website. As such, we can't allow these links as it's already a struggle to keep spam under control. People leave forums when they can't trust what's being posted when they see enough volume of it. I do sincerely apologize that this limits our well-intentioned forum members.

We do allow for links to one's blog our business in your profile (as long as no one says "go look at my profile" as that's just circumvention). It puts the onus on someone browsing our forum to click to a profile and be the one to choose to learn more about that person. Your profile is an appropriate place to share more about yourself without risk of their being an ulterior motive for sharing such information in our message boards.

It's not ideal, and thank you to everyone for your understanding.

"It depends on the blog. As you can see from the rule above, you can link to a personal blog in a post as long as it's not done for financial gain."

To clarify, Mardee's assessment here is not quite right. We'll remove any link to your own blog (unless it is in your profile) whether it is for financial gain or not. I can't tell you how many first-time posters just want more people to read their blog and come here, drop a link, and disappear never to return. It's not what our forum is for, and it doesn't intend for discussion to happen here.