Did you participate in the fun blog "quiz" I mentioned in my last post? If you didn't notice it here, you've no doubt seen it elsewhere as well. I'm talking about this free blog quiz:
Mingle2 - Free Online Dating
A LOT of knit bloggers have participated in this. I've seen this on at least 20 blogs. But am I the first to notice that this is a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ploy? It soooo is!!!! In fact, this has to be one of the most clever SEO tricks I've seen yet. Or maybe they're all around me and I just haven't been paying attention.
Have no idea what the heck I'm talking about? Well, let me 'splain...
Notice how the code for the image above automatically places a link to the blog quiz page on the Mingle site. Convenient, huh? When we bloggers use free tools and quizzes we find on the 'Net, we like to provide a link back. It's common courtesy. It's the least we can do. And that link is perfect because it takes our readers to the exact page where they can take the free quiz too.
Of course, some of us would prefer to use our own link and our own text for linking to other sites. In my previous post, you'll see that I deleted their text and link and added my own text as well as a link back to their site.
In fact, I was so into taking the free blog quiz that I didn't even pay a bit of attention to the site that housed the free blog quiz. Or should I say that I didn't pay attention to the online dating site that housed the free blog quiz. That's right. An online dating site is the host of this fun blog quiz.
They're happy to rate our blog for free, but what's in it for them?
I'm glad you asked that question. As we copy and paste their code to our site so we can announce to the world just how our blog rates, we're providing a reciprocal link right to the front door of their online dating site. And that's not all.
By copying their code, we're actually hot linking right to their server.
But wait a minute. Hot linking is bad, right? We knit bloggers talk about hot linking all of the time. We don't mind if fellow bloggers use our images as long as they host them on their own servers (or their blog hosting servers) and as long as they're not stealing our bandwidth. Why would this site invite us to use their bandwidth to host this image?
That's where the reciprocal linking comes into play. Even if we delete the code for the extra links that follow the image, the image itself provides a direct link back to their site. Don't believe me? Click one of the images from a blog that posted this blog quiz. Chances are most bloggers who participate in this free blog quiz do not notice or do not bother to remove the code that links back. Why would we? A link back is the least we can do for using their free quiz, right?
But just what does an online dating site have to do with rating blogs? Why do they care how your blog rates? Why would they take the time to develop the code for a blog quiz? Why would they use their bandwidth to host the image and all the hot links from everywhere? Why indeed.
That's where the SEO I mentioned above comes into play.
Hover your cursor over the "General Audiences" rating image above. Notice the alt text that pops up stating "free online dating"? That's what it's all about. That's also where this gets a little harder to explain.
Let's say you're searching for online dating sites. When you type "free online dating" into the search box on Google, you're going to see the results returned by algorithms that consist of a combination of web crawlers, metadata, content, and reciprocal links. The reciprocal links come into play because search engines find sites more valuable if a lot of other valid sites link to them and rate them higher in the search. It's even better if we link them using the same text or phrases that people are searching for, such as "free online dating".
So, by taking the free blog quiz and adding the code to our site, we are actually providing a reciprocal link and helping to rank their site higher in the search engines. More importantly, we're helping them to rank higher when other people Google "free online dating".
So, what's my point? Why did I bother to take the time to point all of this out? Awareness. I didn't notice this at first myself. And maybe nobody else cares, but I'm rather selective about who I link on my knitting blog. I try to be selective anyway. And I try not to fall for the clever ploys. I think that's going to become more and more difficult as the Web matures.
The bottom line is that I don't usually go around providing links to online dating sites and most of the knitting blogs that I read do not link to online dating sites either.
I plan to leave their free blog quiz up for the next week or so (just so this entry makes sense) and then I'm taking it down. I don't plan to start linking to online dating sites at the moment, but I'll keep them in mind in case that changes.
I noticed it and that's why I didn't bother pasting it! Yours and mine are the only blogs I know that rate a "G".
Posted by: Marina | July 17, 2007 at 02:39 PM
What a great discussion - I loved reading this!
Posted by: keri | July 18, 2007 at 09:24 AM