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Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

michael — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 12:04:57 -0000

thanks for the info i found it realy useful i have only just started bloging never really thought it was for me oh how wrong i was.lol if you be kind enough to look my blog over and maybe tell if things need changing i would really be greatful
http://windows7infoblog.blo...

Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

John — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 22:46:32 -0000

This is an incredible article that really explains some of the points I keep trying to explain to my friends in regards to blog linking and other social networking marketing ideas. Keep up the great work!

Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

Tony Sena — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 23:43:18 -0000

I still would take quality traffic or quantity of traffic any day. I noticed I get a great amount of traffic from Twitter after I write a blog article but I am pretty confident that Twitter is not generating the traffic I want. I am looking for consumers that want to buy or sell real estate in Las Vegas. Most of my targeted traffic still uses the search engines to find what they are looking for, not social media sites but I am sure that will change over the next 3 to 5 years.

Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

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Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

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Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

Michael Becker — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:32:28 -0000

The modern Web has devalued linking; you're right to say that all of the new ways we read blogs have minimized the number of times we have to click on a hyperlink, which is sad considering that the hyperlink is really the bedrock feature of the Web. (Side note: it makes me wonder whether people will eventually reduce the number of links in their Web pages to the point that Google's PageRank feature doesn't work anymore). I know that when I read my daily dose of blogs in NetNewsWire and Feed Demon, I don't click through often.

However, I find that links to new sites still intrigue me enough to click on them, even in my RSS reader. That's why I have so many bloody RSS feeds: people link to new blogs that I've never heard of before and I immediately add them to my subscriptions list for later reading.

Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

Orrorin — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 06:55:49 -0000

Blogs became commidities and are starting to show their limits (certainly for the most widely known ones). They are to transform, evolve, dissapear and revive in a new mold. As the internet is continuing its growth based on social behaviors and application, I believe that blog linking has a great future, but not the way it is done today.

Having myself a very small (and new blog) I start understanding the importance of interaction over linking. But where does the difference between both lies, or rather, how to merge both and make them become one? That is the real question.

The one who manages to define it, might actually come with the next big application...
(and I'm not talking about wiki technology)

Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

dilvie — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 06:37:58 -0000

You're under-estimating the power of that google-juice, and you're under-estimating the power of a big blog write up to drive a lot of other inbound links, and mentions on those same social media sites that you're raving about here. Did it occur to you that a lot of people coming from the social media sites may never have visited without the links in the influential blogs?

Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

shel Israel — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:46:59 -0000

I find that traffic from large site links just passes through in the form of a numerical spike. When the issue poin ted to is over, just about all the new visitors go away. When visitors come from links of smaller blogs, a larger percentage become regular visitors. Bottom line, I'm beginning to think links from lesser knw bloggers are more valuable to me than links from the big names.

Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

jerry — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:12:47 -0000

Blog linking was never important, just novel....

Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

Henrick — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:12:14 -0000

That's why search engines like www.blogdimension.com propose microblogs search (Twitter, Jaiku, FriendFeed, Tumblr, etc.).

Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

sarahintampa — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:50:36 -0000

I'll admit, I'm a little confused by the title.

Getting linked boosts Google traffic. Google traffic is more than double FriendFeed traffic and still your #1 source of traffic. Looks to me that linking is still extremely important.

What's really going on is that FriendFeed is now another channel for incoming links (like Charlie says above).

The stats I'd *really* like to see are the incoming referrals from Google.com over time. Were they higher prior to FriendFeed's launch? After FriendFeed became popular have the Google referrals decreased? If so, then you could say linking is "less important." If not, then you could say FriendFeed is a big source of traffic. But just because FriendFeed traffic has increased, that doesn't mean Google traffic has decreased (has it?)

Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

Dennis D. McDonald — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:43:08 -0000

Excellent commentary. I've sort of felt this analysis myself, even though my own blog is much more obscure.

But aside from traffic, linking, sources being social sites, or whatever, what I'm beginning to suspect is that interest groups -- some people call them "communities" -- have absolute sizes and intensity levels that drive their interaction frequency, and this interaction can occur through an increasing variety of means, not just via linking, phone calls, IMs, tweets, or whatever.

I'm sure network analysts have a more technical term for this phenomenon, which is that, for any given type of social event, the participants will choose a method of interaction that is available, easy to use, and appropriate to the participants and rge occasion. Linking is a behavior that takes effort. Why engage in it when you can just jump into FriendFeed or Twitter and connect?

One thing to watch out for, though, is to assume geeks and non-geeks behave similarly. Another issue is that, by focusing too much on interacting with like-minded groups, our ideas and thoughts won't "leak out" to others who might also be interested in benefiting.

Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

moneyries — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:39:00 -0000

It's still a blast to check out the site meter and see your blog linked to by an influential blogger with a million-plus readership.

Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

elliottng — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:01:16 -0000

Got it. This was helpful. I think Google will have to evolve to capture signals sent via TinyURL, GoogleReader sharing, Twitter, FriendFeed. This will be much more difficult because the context is more difficult to decipher than in blogs. But I'm sure Google will figure that out.

But I see what you are saying about the oxygen being sucked out of the ecosystem by the big blogs and aggregators and the increasing difficulty of monetization.

All I ask is: for people like louisgray and centernetworks and scoblelizer, give out links generously to smaller bloggers because it is the fuel that will power their discoverability through Google.

I don't have anything intelligent to say about the monetization issue other than to say thanks for explaining!

Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

Liz — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:01:12 -0000

This is very interesting. I find that there is a lot of repetition in the topics of the blogs I use to visit so I'm just being more selective, trying to read blogs in a wider variety of fields instead of the same old, same old. It led me here!

Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

Svetlana Gladkova — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:58:35 -0000

Louis, since I actually realized traffic is rarely huge from linking blogs, I never actually expected I'd get some from here - my P.S. was nothing but a joke, of course.

And I still have doubts about how smart Google is in determining splogs and not taking them into account to calculate pagerank. At least Technorati still shows all the splogs and the authority is often pretty much increased when a link to your blog is scraped from a TechCrunch post.

And so instead of sitting on my hands I think I'd better thank you for adding Profy to your list of the most prominent tech blogs - I don't know how it escaped my mind in the first comment :)

Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

centernetworks — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:42:38 -0000

what i am saying is that in the tech blogosphere, there are a few things going on that if brought together could be bad. let me spell them out for you...

1. a few of the big blogs refuse to link outside their network
2. techies are using tools like twitter and ff to share things - not the typical blog links like they were using in the past
3. more and more tech people are reading content in a reader which basically isn't monetizable. then when they see a story they like, they google share it or pimp it on ff or twitter - again no link

what it means is that we all have to work even harder for the links we have

Danny makes an excellent point regarding Google - for a handful of blogs, they already have their google credits and so no future linking to those blogs will matter at all. For those of us who need links, the discussion is quite different.

Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

David Dalka — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:38:34 -0000

It's about relevancy, not quantity of traffic. You're right about quantity, wrong about relevancy to people who live "outside social media". Links, like it or not, still determine that for "normal people" - you know those 99.9% of the world that actually lives outside the echo chamber. For many people those random search visitors are far more valuable.

Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

elliottng — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:31:34 -0000

I totally disagree with this comment from Allen. Certain kinds of amplification blogging or repeating will be sucked into FriendFeed and other aggregators, as will commenting. But long-form prose will continue to be needed for making more complex arguments where people need more control over content presentation than what you get in FriendFeed or a Disqus comment. And people will continue to pursue long-term and larger courses of study/discussion/dialog in the form of a blog.

Also, there is the issue of Google. I'm not sure what Google will be doing with the distribution of comments and content into Twitter, FriendFeed and other aggregators. There will be a slow evolution but in the meantime, Google's algo will probably still reward high quality blogs with lots of high quality links and high quality content.

If Allen amends his comment to be: "Blogging is Dead! Long Live Blogging!" then I will agree. But this new form of blogging will be have to be much higher quality as certain types of blogging behavior migrate into Disqus, FriendFeed, Twitter, GoogleReader, etc.

Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

elliottng — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:26:12 -0000

Louis, your blog post "Seems to be misleading". I echo Danny's comment. There is no more powerful signal to Google about your importance and your thematic area and your keyword space than links from authority blogs and websites. Especially for new bloggers and new blogs, getting links from established blogs is paramount if they are to be discovered for topics that they are focusing on, and that relevant traffic via search is super important in that initial 6 months when you are just writing for yourself...wandering in the desert looking for the promised land of readers and feedback. So I think this post may be correct for well established older blogs with lots of links from other established authoritative sites already. But for the new blogger, links can be the difference between the search traffic that keeps them in the game and another failed blog lost in the wilderness.

Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

Maria Reyes-McDavis — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:15:54 -0000

Great, great insightful post. I've noticed the same in my traffic logs, as well!

Maria Reyes-McDavis

Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

michaeldaehn — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:15:31 -0000

@spuds Like other media, it is a both/and not an either/or proposition. We still have AM radio and Postal Mail. We are adding tools. It will get tougher to keep up with everything, or you will need to specialize or outsource in specific areas.

A trend I see is person to person. How do corporations tweet or create Facebook profiles? These tools are for individuals. That means corporations will need to empower and unleash the voices of their employees if they want to play in this space.

Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

spragued — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:14:24 -0000

It's all good. Blog linking was an inefficient method for sharing info/ driving traffic. Socnets are far more efficient. For example, yesterday something I wrote was Twittered by Dare Obesanjo, which drove a bunch of traffic, then someone picked it up from Twitter and put it on their Facebook wall. Lots more traffic. Waiting around in the "old days" for my blog buddies to pick up an item and share it was far less productive.

And, as a content producer, I like the fact that socnets are depleting the blogging pool by reducing the number of sites of people who were just looking for conversations. The hordes of eager commenters on all the new outlets need content to chew on, which means those of us who continue to write will see our value increase.

Re: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

Andrew Meyer — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:13:38 -0000

Blog linking behavior seems to be a bit different from blog category to category. I know your post is commenting more on tech blogs, but the other blog categories are interesting as well.

For instance, I think music blogs have always had poor in-post blog linking (but great mp3 file linking and extensive blogrolls). Gabe Rivera once showed me an unreleased Techmeme for music blogs. He said that it didn't track music memes very well for a variety of reasons but mostly linking. And, that's why we've never seen it in the Techmeme stable with Memeorandum, WeSmirch, Ballbug, etc.