I just wanted to note that last night I talked to Oliver, face to face, and he offered a genuine apology which I accepted. At this point, I’ve stated the facts related to the issue at hand and am ready to move on.

When I’ve noticed, I’ve contacted Rich and he told me about that it got hacked. To built it up again, just for fun is quite a task, if you have also a lot of other projects running, so I can understand that he decided not to have it any longer.

I agree with John. He could have linked to another site of his just as good. Would we then discuss it here? I see the bloggers’ view who have linked to it. But is it Rich’ task to check all sites who has linked to it & inform them to unlink? A quick message on the site would have made it, but you know how things are, when you are busy.

At the moment I’ve seen it off-line, I’ve just deleted my link and all was fine.

I think that a lot of people are now in a mood of bashing on each other. That doesn’t help at all, especially the way it is happening the last couple of days now. A DM or email to Rich, which would have told him about about you see it, would have done the job.

Thanks Rich for having the list in the past. Maybe let’s have another one… as long I’m listed in it, of course. Hahaha

Guys & gals… Let’s take a step back & let’s get back to have a lot of fun & discuss our passion: Travel

The old site doesn’t exist any more, Rich chose to forward visitors to T5 rather than hit a 404 page. He could also forward it to Brilliant Trips, or this site, or any other site that he owns. It’s *his* to do with whatever he wants.

1 — you started a list of top influencers in travel.
2 — many of us that were on the list linked back there in our Press/PR pages, giving that website Google juice, as you and all of us know is valuable.
3 — you decided to shut down the site.
4 — you joined up with T5.
5 — you 301 redirected the “top” list to T5, which has absolutely nothing at all to do with the original top list.
6 — those of us that were providing Google juice to a top list had no intention of providing Google juice to T5.
7 — and in the end, it very well might benefit your bottom line, because you joined up with T5, so it looks quite bad.

If T5 was doing some sort of similar top list, then yea, I think none of us would be upset. But you basically just took all of our Google juice intended for one topic and redirected it to another project you were involved in. I know from inside the picture frame it sometimes is hard to see the picture, but with all due respect, this pretty clearly looks bad from the outside.

There is a simple solution though — just stop the redirect. Given T5′s recent concern about paid links and fooling with Google searches and stuff, ask yourself this question — are people searching for “top influencers in travel” on Google really intending to get sent to T5 as a result of that search? Of course not. It is deceptive. To searchers and to those that provided links to the list in the first place. Of course, just my opinion.

I have absolutely no doubt about your intentions and that there was no “sinister” motive involved. You did the travel blogger community a great service by building the Influencers in Travel site. Many have benefited from the exposure generated from the influence lists and they showed their vote of approval by linking to it from their blogs and media packs. Communications about the site being closed and the subsequent redirect to T5 could’ve been handled better I think as many bloggers had linked specifically to the influencers list.

Cheers,
Keith