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While I’m waiting to link up to my SQL server so I can actually do some work for which I get paid an enormous (cough, cough, cough) salary, I was perusing some blogs as is my wont during down times and dropped in on one of my “regulars”, Lucky Girl Trading.
Today she’s talking about seeing all the lists of “top EntreCard droppers”, “Top Commenters” and “EntreCard Ads for the Week” on other blogs (I see them, too) and how kinda boring those posts are. She recognizes the goodness of giving link love to her community of readers, but isn’t quite sure about the best way to go about it.
She’s polling her readers to see if she should do something similar (all in the name of Link Love you understand). She’s worried that they will, like her, think such posts are boring and that will lead them into the temptation of skipping her blog when she’s passing along link juice as a form of reward to those who have dropped, advertised and/or commented (take your pick) and by doing so might miss another more interesting post.
In my experience and in my not-so-humble opinion, there are ways and then there are WAYS to extend the hand of community love to your fellow bloggers and they none of them involve lists, awards or memes.
For awhile, I was doing a weekly post on blogs I had come across during my blog-hopping and gave you a little synopsis of the blog and why it piqued my interest. I haven’t done one of those in awhile and face it, it’s still a list, it can still be boring to many readers, so what else can I and Lucky Girl do?
I can write a post like this about another blog and mention a blog post within it that I can use to illustrate a point I’m trying to make. Doing it this way doesn’t give you as many links (which, given the attention span of some of my readers — can we say gnat? — that’s not such a bad thing) or pass around quite as much link love as a list does, but is probably more effective and not just because it can be made much more interesting to your reader than a simple list will ever be.
One thing that keeps being pointed out by the authorities in SEO is that having too many links is as bad (or worse) than not having enough. Using one or two judiciously incorporated links to other, worthy sites within a post is much more effective than posting a list of 5, 10 or 100 links. And don’t forget to link to older posts of your own (after all, who deserves your link love more than YOU?). Again, the SEO authorities (and please do not confuse yourself–I don’t consider myself one of them) point out that Google likes to see that you think of yourself as an authority.
While using plug-ins such as Related Posts can help in back linking to your older posts, I’m not totally convinced that these links provide the same results as does a more natural and contextual link. Someone would have to do a study comparing a blog that totally depended upon Related Posts for internal linking to one that did only natural contextual links. My blog would not qualify since I do both (when I think about the natural contextual ones anyway).
Does anybody know of a plug-in that works kind of like Related Posts but can be set to do the contextual links instead of just giving a list at the bottom of the post? I see that WordPress pulls in links mostly from Wikipedia (at least I THINK it’s Wordpress doing it, but it may be Zemanta). If you could direct that to link your older posts to the keywords in the post you’re writing, that would be awesome and provide you with the best of both worlds.
Anyway, don’t you think this is an alternative to Lucky Girls’ list? Wasn’t this more interesting to read than a list of blogs? What’s your take on blogrolls? You’ll notice that I don’t have much of one. Do you have one? Do you keep it actively maintained? Does it provide value to your blog? How do you determine the value it’s brought you?
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Tags: blog, Google, Link Juice, Link Love, Plug-in, Plugins, SEO, SEO, Wikipedia, Wordpress, Zemanta
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October 7th, 2008 at 10:39 am
I’m anxiously watching to see what your readers think. What you’ve done is infinitely more interesting than any list–especially ‘cuz it’s about me! hehe
Thanks for the linky love with interest, and I’ll be back to check out how the opinions flow.
October 7th, 2008 at 11:49 am
@LG — you’re entirely welcome ! Thank YOU for the inspiration for the post — see, it was a nice trade off
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October 7th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Hi,
Andraz from Zemanta here.
About links… that’s Zemanta showing you links to wikipedia, Amazon, IMDB, etc.
We are actually thinking of enabling just what you are talking about - selecting a piece of text and then putting the link over it when you select a related article. You might see it in future releases of Zemanta, but can’t promise it.
bye
Andraz Tori, CTO at Zemanta
October 7th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Contextual linking is a 200% improvement on those boring lists. I like this and will most definitely keep it in mind in future.
I also like your requirements for a WP plugin, let’s hope some kind plugin author comes a-calling.
I have a blogroll which I limit to 10. I do not use a normal list, I show graphics for each site instead (I simply used their EC graphics). This does slow my site down slightly but I show the blogroll on the home page only. According to my WP stats the sites on my blogroll do get a few clicks to their sites via these graphics. Those with the nice looking graphics get the clicks, the rest not.
Personally I feel that a blogroll does not really serve a great purpose. In all honesty I use it as a way of saying thanks to all the guys and girls who are commenting regularly, giving advice when I need it and generally just being nice visitors.
October 7th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
I find those posts that give credit to droppers etc as boring, too. And I really don’t like those awards where you have to go find five other blogs to give the award to. Bleh I don’t have the time for them and I don’t do them… sorry to those who have giving it to me but oh well. It’s like a chain letter and those get deleted immediately.
Anyway I wonder why you have the wikipedia links in your posts? Are those bad for SEO too? I am not a SEO person and I don’t even know if my blogs have good SEO or not. My blog rolls are for my own use because I do try to actually visit them, and they remind me that I want to visit them. I don’t keep them for SEO or link love sorry… but that’s just me.
October 7th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
@Andraz — that’s exciting news! And thank you for clearing that up about Zemanta — by the way, if you don’t use Zemanta, do give it a try –it can be used either as an add-in on Firefox or as a Wordpress plugin. They’ve recently made improvements to it so it will connect with your Flickr account and will pull in your Flickr photos to your posts and as Andraz says, provides links to either home sites or Wikipedia. To answer Cynthia’s question, I like using these links because I feel it helps my readers be able to get more information about some of the things I see as key in my posts without my having to do the labor of finding said links. Andraz — if I had a “wish list” of things Zemanta would do, not only would it parse my database for relevant articles, but it would allow in it’s configuration for me to enter the URL’s of sites I think of as authoritative on certain subjects to also parse. One of the other really nice things that Zemanta does is pull in links to articles that may be relevant to your post and those you can add at the bottom of your post — I’ve done that a time or two here. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see others have some of my articles at the end of their posts, so Zemanta helps to get you some back links.
@Lyndi — thanks! We share a lot of the same opinions on things web related it seems. When it comes to a blogroll, I guess I am just lazy
as I don’t do much to maintain the pitiful excuse for one that I have.
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October 8th, 2008 at 12:28 am
I don’t have an official blogroll I did participate in some link exchanges so those links are on my site. I started posting my top EC droppers only because I wanted to thank the people who took the time to visit my blog (even if it were those who dropped and ran). I know a lot of others do it as well but I can’t speak for them and that’s why I choose to do the link love. Now that I have the widget in my sidebar I don’t have to bother with the actual post unless I want to.
Then again one of the good things about everyone having their own space to control is the fact that you can control it however you want. So if you don’t want to have a blogroll or pass along the chain letters then you don’t have too. It’s not like anyone is going to sue you right (lol)?
October 8th, 2008 at 4:14 am
@IA - According to the SEO experts (and again, I’m not one of them) those link exchanges are only good for so much and then the spiders discount them. The widget that shows top droppers or last droppers is written in Javascript which the bots can’t see, so it provides no link love (or so I’ve been told). Ask Turnip for a definitive answer on that.
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October 8th, 2008 at 6:07 am
Yes,
This article was much more interesting than a link list. And I agree that doing something different is good. I’m trying to come up with a new way to do the link love thing too.