The post External Links and Carnivals first appeared on %sitename% - Working Hard On The Internet.
Link Carpet Bombing
After last week’s discussion of external linking, and the search for links from the big boys, I didn’t go into depth about the current methodology I have in place.
I have been overdoing the whole social media thing and plan on curtailing this activity for a while and seeing if it changes much, but I have added a new way to build up links to posts, Carnival Carpet Bombing.
The important thing is to get all your posts links of some kind so they don’t become little orphans (this means internal or external links, but mainly external links). As most of my readers of THE Canadian Personal Finance Blog know, I create new content every week (usually about five posts), and I have been making a conscious effort to make sure that each post has a link to something internally on my site (usually a much older post), to ensure I have fewer orphaned posts (especially older ones).
The second thing I do is typical, on Thursday, I will go to Blog Carnival Central and submit each of the posts for the week to one of the many Personal Finance carnivals to ensure that then each post has an external link to it (hence the concept of Carnival Carpet Bombing).
Will this bring a lot more readership to my site? I am skeptical, it sometimes brings spikes in readership, but there is a low retention rate for these new readers. This does add external links, and if you are starting out, more likely than not from a higher Page Rank site, which then gives you a higher Page Rank. If the external site linking to you is not an identified SPAM or SCRAPING site, this can only help your site in Google’s Eyes.
What might be useful would be a tool to wander around the net and draw the link map for each of your post, showing where it might have links to, and show the traversal path of robots through your Internal Link Lattice as well. Does anybody know of such a tool? I prefer graphical output since text files with thousands of words give me headaches.
NB: So the ability to do this has become a lot harder with the death of Carnivals as a methodology and the inability to easily enrol in them.
The post External Links and Carnivals first appeared on Working Hard On The Internet.
