Herdbeasts Of The Blog Savannas

One of the ever-present questions for most blog writers is the question of traffic. What they are really interested in is knowing that the words they are crafting are being mulled over by some readers. Maybe not mulled over, but at least looked at, more preferably by a lot of readers. In the practical world of the internet there are advertisers who will pay to have their name, product, or service put in front of those readers if there are a lot of them. So how to get readers is a vital issue, and like most vital issues it has generated a lot of false answers.

One of the great misunderstandings of blogging and the internet revolves around this truth: to be read, you must be found. In the wide world of the internet this has generated a value system based on incoming links. Since it takes a link to get from wherever the reader is to the site you want them at this seems to make sense. The most powerful reflection of this value system is the Google Pagerank. But does it really work that way in the Blogosphere?

I started playing a game called Blogshares. One of the useful bits of information I got from playing is a listing of all the incoming links my blogs have among other blogs in the game. There were incoming links that I had never seen on my traffic monitors. I looked at the sites these links came from and could see why. A list of links down the sidebar headed 'Other Blogs' is not going to generate traffic going anywhere. I appreciate the effort, and it's great for my blog's value in the Blogshares game. It even has some small effect on my pagerank with Google and the other search engines. It isn't going to generate traffic, much less readers.

Blogshares is just one of many social structures among blogs that comes from this valuing of incoming links. There are 'marriages', characterized by 'you link me and I'll link you' relationships. Far more commonly there are 'clans', groups of blogs where they all have links to each other. Then there are the widely promiscuous blogrollers, whose link value is minimal. Not only do they generate no traffic, but their impact on pagerank is diluted to near zero by their large numbers of outgoing links. Great for a quick laugh though; nothing like seeing 'blogs I read' at the head of a list of a hundred or so links.

So my answer is; no, incoming links do not really reflect the blogs ability to draw readers. Particularly if the incoming links are predominantly from other blogs. So what's a blogger to do? First thing is to not give up on the existing social structures, even if they do not do the great good we all wish they did. Even if their worth is vastly overestimated, they do have worth. As any creature grazing the plains of the biosphere can attest, there is strength in numbers. The same holds true in the blogosphere.