I was doing a bit of blog surfing tonight and happened to notice someone who had Dragonchasers in their blog roll. Someone who wasn’t in my blog roll.
I fixed that now.
But please, I don’t want to be what Ysh an unnamed blogger calls a link leech!! If you’re linking here and I’m not returning the favor, just give me a shout. You can comment here or nudge me on twitter.
Oh dear, what have I started! 😉
Link leeches are a particular kind of leech. 99% of cases are just the usual “I forgot to tell you, but hey, you’re on my blogroll!” kind of things.
I should have known this would bite me in the blog. 😀
I fixed the post so no one will be able to trace the term back to you!!
Seriously, I didn’t mean that in any kind of negative way. I just want to be sure I’m returning the favor if someone is linking to me. 🙂
Link Leech?
I’m confused. How is it “leeching” if I happen to read a blog and link to it but the blog I’m linking to doesn’t link back? They don’t owe me anything. I just link because… well, because I took the time to. The full list on my Reader is probably 4X what my blogroll lists, but it’s my blog… I don’t want it to start feeling like a second job maintaining the links.
Besides, I get the feeling most people click the links on comment names, not the blogroll list. Someone makes an interesting comment somewhere I’m personally more inclined to click their link to see what else they say than to click some random blogroll link with no description. Or am I just weird that way?
Yeah, I’m with Scott…Your blog is your blog, you don’t have to make links to everybody else on the internet! Blog rolls can be convenient, though, but I add things on my blog roll more for my own convenience than for others’.
Guys, please, don’t take it so seriously… the term was used in jest.
Blogrolls are just to please our robot overlords: the search engines. No one actually clicks on them, do they?
The more sites link to you, the better your search engine ranking (all else being equal).
Actually, I click on my own links every day. I don’t use RSS feeds (no good reason, really), so I do my daily reading largely via links.
Interesting, so your blog is like your home page?
I better rephrase:
No one except Aaron actually clicks on them, do they?
🙂
I really just have them for page ranking purposes…
I would be interested in a link exchange, if you think my site is worthy enough. =)
Let me know.
Mike
Talbo Clan, Flurry (formerly Naritus)
SWGBlog.NET
I click on links from my blog page. I haven’t bothered setting up a reader, and I don’t have everyone bookmarked. *shrug*
OK, I’ll address this more seriously.
Aaron and Tesh, do you click on links on other blog pages?
Using your blog page as your bookmarks page is handy for you, but it doesn’t significantly improve the traffic of the blogs linked to. What does improve their traffic is coming up as more relevant in search results, and cross linking helps with that, at least in theory. Unless the search engine determines you’re a link farm, in which case it can hurt things.
I suggest that most blog-to-blog human traffic comes via comment links, as Scott suggests. Someone leaves an interesting comment and you click their name to see what kinds of things they write about on their blog. That seems much more likely than someone picking your blog out of a long blogroll list and deciding to go visit.
But I’ll admit I haven’t done traffic analysis to prove any of this is true. 🙂 I -detest- doing traffic analysis!
Actually, I agree with Scott’s notion. Once in a while I’ll go to a link on someone else’s blogroll, but more often I’ll just follow their comments. I don’t really have any complaints to offer, just observations of my own usage patterns. 🙂