Nobody Links Out Anymore

One of the biggest commandments in professional blogging is that you should link back to your own archives as often as possible.

And henceforth the loyal disciples of the Church of ProBlogging would link within their own blogs and never to anyone else. And little content islands sprang up of greedy bloggers who refused to share the link love with anyone else.

And the Internet wept.

The notion of linking within your own blog is based on three main reasons:

1. Traceability of scraped content: If someone's scraping your writing and republishing it elsewhere, you should be able to discover it through a link: search in Google or Yahoo!
2. Archive 'Churn': Is where you link to something deeper in your archive, giving it a slight PageRank boost. This is an SEO technique related to...
3. Contextual Relevance & Keyword Usage: Use the right keywords in your anchor text while linking back to your own content and you can give an additional boost to your archived posts by highlighting keyword relevancy.

Debunking The Inlinking Phenomenon

Now, I want to address the traceablity issue. It's a valid point - you want to ensure that you can identify another blog or website scraping your content. First: it doesn't have to be in every post. Second: Search engines are very adept at identifying the original source of content and allowing it to rank above scrapers.

My music blog is included in loads of aggregator sites and is scraped regularly too. I don't think I've noticed a scraper beating me for my own content once.

Churning your archives is fine. I recommend it whenever you've got appropriate (especially flagship content) to link back to. However, that's nothing that a related posts plugin for WordPress couldn't do directly underneath the post.

B5 Media versus Shiny Media

I follow a load of blogs in my area, and I wasn't surprised to notice that B5 media bloggers link within their own blogs and within the wider network, but rarely outside of their walled garden of content. What gives? Are the B5 overlords anally insisting their bloggers boost the power of the network at the expense of the wider blogosphere?

This would by wildly ironic, because Darren Rowse is a notoriously generous linker.

Take Brit Music Scene for instance - a paragon of the ProBlogger ethic. Links internally, links within the B5 network, follows the rules of title writing and good keyword usage. I enjoy Dave Parrack's writing immensely, but as far as that blog goes, the rest of the Internet simply doesn't exist.

At Unreality TV on the other hand, we get linked to by Shiny Media blogs like Available For Panto all the time. In fact, I'd say we should link to them more. They're a great crew and we appreciate the links. Thanks guys!

I'm not aware that other blog networks like 9rules have policies requiring inlinking. They seem to inlink out of community spirit, but are fairly relaxed about the other places they link to.

My Linking Out Policy

Me? I believe linking out is good for the blog and the readers.

No blog is an island people, and unless you're Wiki-bloody-pedia, you won't have all the answers in one place. There are other people, other opinions out there just waiting to be found. Why don't you link to them and give your readers a treat?

Here's my link-out policy:

1. Link to official sites if possible. If I'm writing about a singer, I'll link to their homepage or MySpace. If I was writing about a car, I'd link to the manufacturer. A direct link is valuable to the reader if they want more info.
2. Link to related items on other sites. No, it won't destroy your website. Just give it a go. Who knows, maybe the writers on that site might link back to you someday. Stranger things have happened. Again, your readers get to discover different opinions, additional resources or content they may have missed.
3. Does linking out help with relevance? From what the Gods of SEO tell us, yes. If I write a review of a Harry Potter book, then link to the official website and to other reviews/resources, then the mighty Googlebrain will identify that we're linking to trusted resources, our keywords match the 'harry potter' theme.
4. Link quotas. I don't have a definite quota of links per post, but I do try to get between 2 and 4 links if I can.
5. Do links attract links? That's a harder question to answer. One of my most popular posts is a linkblog-type post which somehow attained over 7,500 pageviews. However, I'm not noticing an exponential jump in backlinks just yet. At the same time, I feel better about offering my readers more material than I can give them on my own.

This isn't an attack on Darren, Dave or B5 Media in general. I'm simply using them as an example. There are plenty of other examples out there of sites which act in isolation.

It's sad that this is becoming more and more prevalent on the Internet. Blogging used to be about reaching out and connecting to people with other interests. When people start hoarding their links, it reminds me very much of old media companies like Digital Spy who just refuse to link out - even to important official sites - in case their readers leave the site.

I'm going to keep flying the flag for linking out though.