Link love – good or bad?
February 16th, 2008 by Andreas from Xavier MediaHave 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!
Link love to someone you like!
Time Life Ultimate Love Songs
Link baiting tips
FollowFriday at Twitter
Project Wonderful now even better!
Get your site listed in our UK directory
You’re joking? Right? Elitextreme.com is is a leading carrier of biggest frickin’ ripoff,...
February 16th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Great post. Though it's nice to be linked, I only return the favour if I can make it useful to my readers. I like your content so I'm going to subscribe to it.
February 16th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Thank you very much for this post. More people need to read these kind of articles. The link love posts are indeed link farms and the very people the link love posts are trying to help may be penalized for this behavior.
February 17th, 2008 at 3:13 am
Thanks for the information, I had not thought about these "link love" posts from that perspective.
I currently enjoy decent rankings with search engines, I would not want to hurt that. You have just ended my my participation in these type posts!
February 18th, 2008 at 12:20 am
Great post. I agree, links for the sake of linking are very empty. I do enjoy reading what other bloggers have to say about what they read – but much prefer it to be with an explanation of why they're linking etc. Not just a link for the sake of it.
I've come here via a link from Ben Barden's blog.
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:34 am
I barely realized this matter about a couple days ago. This and that "DoFollow" method lowers your credibility on all search engines.
-Mike
April 8th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
[...] about linking to a blog you like. This is not like the link love I wrote about in "Link love – good or bad?", but this is actually real link love since you're only linking to one blog (and also a [...]