Question for the floor:
Is it better to trash the links to your blog that have nothing to do with your post?
Or better to accept incoming link traffic, even if it's basically a bot--because it drives up your SEO?
For example, for the post below, on Rural and Native libraries, the Sports Guru blog linked to us. Well, I'm flattered but there is nothing sporty or guru-ish about the post. Not to mention it is quite apparent that Sports Guru is a machine-created auto-blog. No editorial brainpower there. So I just deleted their link to us.
Thoughts? My gut would say delete them because the links aren't relevant. And relevancy, usefulness to the user/reader is going to trump pure link love. If it doesn't now, it will soon enough for search engine algorithms. Black box/black hatters notwithstanding.
What do other people think?
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6 comments:
I don't think SEO should be all that significant for a noncommercial blog, particularly one like It's all good. And I think that spam links always damage a blog.
Personally, I disallowed all links/trackbacks from the start (although some still slip through), and automatically delete any "comment" or link that's irrelevant. People go through the comments and click on the links; it serves them well to keep them as clean as possible. Just my opinion.
I agree with Walt C's comment. As a reader, when I see trackbacks that are clearly spam, I feel like the blog's authors aren't doing their jobs.
It's an issue of visual clutter and how much patience a reader does or does not have for dealing with it -- if there are five trackback links and the first two are spam, I'm probably not going to bother even glancing at the next three, even though they could actually point me to intelligent commentary on the post I've just read.
Thanks Walt and Heather! You have confirmed what I was feeling...and now I will put it into practice. Beware spammers and bots, you have met your match.
Ditto. I turned off trackbacks after about two months because they were almost all penis enhancement spam.
All links back to your post / site / url are good... I have done SEO for quite sometime and from what I have seen Google for example only shows a small amount of links when recalled, for example simply go into Google and type "Link:www.WorldCat.org" this will show the sampling of URL's that link back to your site, all of them help "drops in a bucket" -
What separates the pack is the relevance of the link back to yours... Basically if I have a Software site, Google looks at my link coming from say CNet as being more important than say a link from a plumbing site.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is basically built on three aspects
1) Copy within the site - Build your site to have relative to what you believe the clients will relate to your product /service... try narrowing your search terms to one to three phrases per page, use plurals and stemming when available (remember spiders don’t buy - People do)
2) Site Design - Use CSS and static text whenever possible, basically how the site is designed in cooperation with text is a powerful two-step tool (How quickly and easily the spiders can index / read your site). Building your URL title tag in synchronicity with your page copy will give your page significant ranking versus saying one thing but building your page so that the search spider cant read what is being said, or the flow of the site (deep crawling)
3) External links - what this question is about... fact is all links help, but don’t focus on the poor ones, place your energy into getting better ones, site with a good Google Page Rank have significant weight when linking back to you.
Anyone who needs to contact me can get in touch with me through Alice or Jenny at WorldCat..
Thanks Hugh. Hugh Burnham is a consultant we are talking to, about doing a paid search (CPC) campaign for WorldCat.org. It will help increase visibility for libraries and help remind Web searchers that using the library (both online and in person) is a relevant, timely and appealing option to find knowledge with an emotional twist: you can have a community-based human interaction to go with your knowledge, if you so desire it.
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