The Art of Interlinking
Interlinking blogs has had a shaky reputation. On the one had we all know it is beneficial both for blogger and reader, on the other people worry about rumored search engine penalties.
The fact is if you do interlink your blogs in the right way you can escape any of the alleged penalties and reap all the benefits.
What we have to do is escape the fixation with blog rolls.
Yes, I do believe that reciprocal links still work, but I have long been an advocate of not blogrolling. In my opinion an in context link is more effective for all parties, safer and more scalable.
Here are some tips for effective in-content linking:
- Make sure your links beg to be clicked, with color contrast, styling and wording
- Use effective and varied anchor text that is compelling and contains keywords for search juice
- Never never never use underline when your text is not a link, otherwise your reader will be confused and less likely to click your actual links
- Always think after finishing your piece which old posts can you link, on your own and complimentary blogs
- Deep-links are best, find an appropriate post rather than linking a homepage
Inter-link correctly and you will drive traffic, make friends, boost search engine visibility and create more page views per visitor. I can’t think of a good reason not to!
Good tips for us individuals with many sites .. I’ve also been trying to do this more so my Google Alerts catch people trying to scoop my RSS feed without me knowing
Good idea. If I read your article, I might get inspired to write one on another complementing idea, and link to yours as a starting point.
People should not copy ideas if they already exist. People should link to the original idea and write their own perspective.
@HART – Absolutely essential when you have as many as you do :)
@Chip – Yes, as a reader I prefer to see ideas and information added rather than the same copy and paste too :)
Great post. I’ve always been wary of blog rolls too; I thought there would come a day when Google et al would decide that enough was enough.
I link between my blogs, but only when it makes sense to do so. I’ve got several writing-related blogs, and often mention in a post a post I’ve made elsewhere.
To add on top of the never underlining normal text rule, don’t highlight normal text with a different color. If you want to put emphasis on something, just make it bold. I see this too often, and have even done it myself before.
I don’t even have a blogroll in my sidebar. I keep a links section that you can click on to see my links. However, it badly needs to be cleaned out.
@Angela – In general google should always support what is good for the reader, so recommending stuff the reader will also find useful should always be good :)
@Justin – One of the reasons I don’t have a blogroll or links page is I don’t like turning people down, if I don’t have such a list then people don’t ask :) Although that said, I just posted a list of my daily feed reads on my own blog so that is sure to upset some ;)
Chris, thanks for the point about underlining. It seems obvious but I hadn’t thought about it before.
I’ve stopped publishing a blogroll on my site – too much work! I have a public blogroll on Bloglines which people can explore if they’re so inclined…
Joanna
How about using Do Follow for your comment links etc. This allows people some link love and also some benefit when include links in comments…
To be honest, I have never used a blogroll or even looked at one.