Courting Bloggers

Due to the proliferation of blogs with spam content and blogs that are created to simply bloat the number of links pointing to a site, it is no wonder that people have perceived links coming from blogs to be of less value than they were before. The good news though is that according to Bill Slawski’s post entitled “Do Search Engines Love Blogs? Microsoft Explores an Algorithm to Increase PageRank for Pages Linked to by Blogs” search engines may actually still attach value to links from blogs. The reason for this is that according to Microsoft the still assume that the majority of blogs are indeed human-authored and that the authors do link to websites that they sincerely endorse.

What this means for those with flagging energy and enthusiasm when it comes to asking for links from bloggers is that you do need to keep at it since it DOES help your overall SEO campaign. Remember though that you still want to focus your link building campaign to links that would add the most value so that simply gathering links from the millions of blogs is simply inefficient. So if you do want to court bloggers to linking to your website remember to target blogs that are:

• similar in theme/topic to your website’s content – Realistically most of the blogs that will link to you will NOT rank well for the search terms you target but what’s important is to get linked to by as much similarly themed blogs (and websites) as possible so as to reinforce relevance. Of course being linked to by a blog of similar theme that ranks really well in SERPs is even better.
• popular – Look at the number of subscribers! With these blogs it is a good idea to be an active member of the comment section. Even if you do not get the attention of the blog author you just might get the attention of the other commenters.
• going to link to you on the actual post – Being blogrolled is good but being mentioned in an actual post is better. Remember the placement of the link matters.

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Courting Bloggers