I’ve been posting less frequently over the past few days (have I?) because I’ve been really spending time reading a lot of other blogs. I realise one very obvious pattern that distinguishes all the popular blogs versus the ones that are struggling to take off.

What’s that one thing you must do?

Link, link, link!, as what Easton said at BlogChalkTalk about what Stephanie said (oh well!) about how to get more people to read your blog:

blog authors love to see where their traffic is coming from

…and by linking to them, you are potentially sending traffic to them! And guess what, they’ll return the favor, some way or another! Someday they will pop by your blog to drop a comment, or they will write a post and link back to you!

I scrutinize my stats every single day to make sure I visit the people who visit me, or drop me a comment!

Neil from Pronet Advertising also said in his recent post on the 5 deadly sins of blogging, that a blogger should put their readers ahead of themselves. I feel a part providing good stuff for your readers is to provide links to recommend them the good things you’ve read, to help them move from your story to another related one.

That said, why are some people so reluctant to link out?

The only compelling reasons I find why a particular blogger might be reluctant to link out is because of the way Google is known to perform, and the Google webmaster’s guidelines, saying:

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Your performance on Google can be affected in a couple of ways.

  1. By having a large number of links on your website, your run the risk of Google identifying you as a link farm, thereby ostracising your site to the sandbox.
  2. By having a large number of links on your site, you are diluting the power of each link, so each link will not mean as much, meaning even though you may get a high page rank, your links are not that powerful, so to speak.
  3. Lastly, linking out to too many sites will mean a tougher management of these links… you do not know when any of these domains you link will be taken over by some obscene content providers, or might just take away the page leading to a broken link. When either of these happen, your Google rankings suffer.

So should you link?

Yes! You should, and you must!

To reason this out, I think we should all examine what your site is built for.

Are you building it for Google solely? Nope! In fact, you shouldn’t even be building it for Google. You should be building it for the human visitors that come to your site. Google is a great thing and it helps you get found, but really, if you have enough advocates of your site, you can survive even if you get delisted from Google, right? Focus on building this “fan base!”.

To add to that, (and I’ve posted about this before somewhere) – examine the best blogs out there. They link out in almost every single post! In fact, successful blogs even have a post specifically for linking out, probably because they have read so much, but do not have the time to comment on all of them in detail. They have hundreds of outward bound links, and Google is not penalizing them for that! Why? Because in return of links they have given to people, they are getting thousands and thousands back!

Are you linking out enough? If not, its time to start!