Have you seen the phenomenon where people lists of hundreds of blogs they “like” and say that they’re sending something they call link love? What they’re hoping for is to help the fellow blogs they list in their posts by sharing some PR (pagerank) with their friends, but this kind of SEO technics will most likely not work any more because search engines are smarter these days then ever. Due to search engine spam, link farms and other black hat SEO tricks search engines have been forced to implement security measures against these tricks and by sending link love you may get you blog black listed as a link farm Search engines just hate link farms since they only have one purpose: link to other sites. If you get your blog flagged as a link farm you may have all your nice content removed from the search engines databases as punishment.

We also have the problem with duplicate content since most of these link love posts are exactly the same (or at least very similar to each other). Search engines don’t want to show several pages with identical content to searchers, so they have a lot of features installed to make sure duplicate content are removed from their databases. So if your link love post is classified as duplicate content you may see your other pages being punished as well since they may also be duplicate

If you decide to post link love in your blog you should be aware of the fact that link love is just meant for search engines and not your subscribers and readers. Why would anyone like to subscribe to a blog that’s just posting lists of links? Instead you should focus on content for your readers!

How do you send link love without getting banned in search engines and also provide your readers with good content?

The answer is simple. Write a review of the site or blog you like instead of just putting it in a list of hundreds of other links. That will give your readers something useful to read (i.e. your own experience with the site), the search engines will find a page that’s not a duplicate of anything else on the Internet and you send “link love” to the special page you like so much

So stop sending bad link love and start sending good link love instead!

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 16th, 2008 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Blogging, HTML & The Web, Search Engines & Directories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.