New Years Resolutions – Link More

Yes, it’s a little early, but I thought I’d get in with my blogging resolution for next year. I’m going to link more.

I used to write a lot of shorter link posts here pointing to sites, news and blogs I thought useful. But with social networking popularity and Twitter in particular most of my linking over the last year has been via those channels. This is easier for me, more consumable by you (if you are on Twitter) but bad for the sites I link to. Why? It doesn’t help them rank.

One of the main ways that sites rank is via the number of other sites linking to them. And whilst a link from Twitter is technically a valid link, in the scheme of things it carries less and less weight (even if it 301 redirects or it appears in real time search) – especially since most are nofollowed.

So, how to best go about helping sites that I’m following and interested in? By linking to them from my blog here.

And just as I only tweet useful stuff (you’ll notice I’m pretty careful with my tweeting – only 3 or 4 things each day), I’m also only going to blog useful stuff. Yes, it may be repeating stuff, and I may run a slight echo chamber risk (in a good way!), but I think it’s worthwhile. Some of sites and blogs that I read deserve much higher rankings. Linking to them will be my tiny ‘vote of confidence’ contribution. Plus an opportunity to spend more than 140 characters mentioning them :-)

Maybe you’d like to help? Let’s resurrect the blogging practices of 2+ years ago and start pointing out the useful stuff again – in a way that the search engines will use.