Why automating related post links on other sites can be high risk |
This morning Jason Falls shared his thoughts about linking effectively and where to find good sources to link (emphasis mine):
That said, while you’ll get more blog exposure and promotion by linking to other blogs, you’d be foolish not to link to traditional websites or news outlets that also contain good content. Some bloggers are unnecessarily self-righteous when it comes to traditional news outlets and think there’s better content to be had in the blogosphere. Frankly, they’re short-sighted. Some blogs offer great insight and context. Most traditional media outlets do.
Jason closes an insightful post asking for link habits and tricks learned from others but then, as (too many?) other bloggers are doing out there, uses the automated Zemanta related external links plugin and closes with a link to Sphere related links (machine 2X).
I’m curious, did he choose any of these links or let the machine choose all for him? If he didn’t vet these links, I’m wondering why he uses these services? He writes a post about the importance of finding good links and then ends the post by letting some third party software choose what links on other websites are related to his post for his readers?
Or is the message: follow what’s in the post body and ignore what follows? If so, too many blogs are like that these days.
The good news
The related links under the heading of "Related articles by Zemanta and Jason Falls" are all on topic and related. So good in fact that I added Zemanta to my to-do list to learn more.
The first Zemanta/Falls link is a Google webmaster blog link: Linking out, often it’s just applying common sense keys on a couple things not to do which include:
- allowing unmonitored linkage, especially user-generated links
- undisclosed advertising links (not using rel=nofollow) can reduce site credibility
- too many links on a page. Suggestion has always been keeping number of links on any page under 100.
Second up is a post cleverly titled Self-linking could make you go blind which goes through the pros and cons of self-linking. The author, Mark Dykeman, doesn’t really answer if self-linking is good or bad from his own point of view in the post and hopes his comment area will help. Fortunately, it does. This is a great blog post technique, post an article with research results and then flesh out those results in the comment area.
As of this writing Mark made eight comments, some of which that would have been nice to see opined in the post body like:
It certainly makes sense to me to link to relevant content. However, it also makes sense to me to link to the outside world on occasion to recognized pillar posts or other authoritative pieces of information. That’s only fair and you’re doing your reader a service by linking out to the best stuff. And when your stuff is the best stuff, then it’s just sweet.
And:
Ultimately it’s the blogger’s choice. I’m just saying that people look at the practice of self-linking in different ways.
Bingo! Check that out, three links for Mark with two of them for his comment area. It continues to be my opinion that a smart comment section is worth its weight in goal many times over.
The third external link from Jason leads to a Search Engine Land blog post about link building that starts by talking about how review spam and then moves into Google personalized search, where author Eric Ward writes:
From a linking perspective, the common thread through all three of these news items is that at the end of the day, when the dust clears, when the results are toggled and tweaked and reshuffled, trust reigns.
The fourth link covers how and why you should link internally on your website as well as targeting keywords. The majority of what this post describes I never do intentionally. I don’t set out to build pages to link to past pages, in fact, I try not to do that (even though there are links in this post to past posts).
If I’ve already written about something before I usually pass unless something new/additional of substance can be added or I’ve changed my position on something (consistency). If you change your opinion on something you felt strongly about in a past post you owe it to yourself and readers to explain why the change.
I look more at this blog’s individual posts as pages in a book moving the story of life forward. Editors would frown on hashing and rehashing the same topic and inconsistency. Some bloggers rewrite their content every week and that gets old for me as a reader fast. I try not do that here. Won’t say I’m always successful, but readers should know the effort is there.
In the case of linkrot, this is a subject I care passionately about and don’t mind revisiting. I want my friends, some of you reading this now, if you are thinking of starting your own blog or making your existing blog better to take what you link to seriously.
In the fifth and final link a post by Mitch Joel highlights a lot of how I feel about linking too:
I think links are what makes reading content online so interesting, engaging, exciting and fresh. I choose to link in hopes that others do as well. I choose to link in hopes that it becomes standard operating procedure and a best practice for online content. I choose to link so that you can choose where you want to go now or next. Linking has become way too much about what it can do for the content creator. I think it’s time to go back to the beginning and start linking because it’s about what it can do for the reader and their online experience.
Again, these collection of Zemanta/Falls links are a very good example of using a machine. Even so, it’s too bad though that Jason didn’t find some way to weave these links into the post body. Sticking at the end as automated external results is a high risk play.
The bad news
Don’t think so? Now take a look at what mess turned up when I clicked the Sphere: Related Content link in his post (and no, not going to link any of that here), which is the very last link before the linked post tags:
Please tell me what Electronic Investor or an ad for Bank of America has to do with link tips and tricks? Blogger’s talking about "This Topic" = Flexibility? Seattle Celebrate Local and Save Green This Holiday Season? Videos for Blogging 2.0 and finding a blog in a haystack?
Unrelated external link nightmare
Sure, there appear to be a couple related posts in there like "Blogging is about linking, 5 reasons to link" or (maybe?) "Seven sizzling ways to turn targeted traffic towards your blog." I don’t know, didn’t follow. And if I don’t follow, I don’t link. Something tells me that Jason wouldn’t have linked to most of this either.
That’s the problem in a screenshot. I don’t trust machines to figure out what is related on external sites. I barely trust them on first party content. Once upon a time I tried Sphere and despite thinking it was "promising" it didn’t last long here. The concept is great when it works but when it doesn’t, it looks like the garbage in the screenshot above and isn’t useful to readers at all.
We’ve been using a plugin (machine) for related posts from this site and sometimes links will be duplicated in the post body as I’m suggesting above. Beyond the number of links being displayed none of these ‘related posts’ links are human vetted. It’s something about this blog that I’d like to improve someday. I’d like for those links to be vetted with some sort of short commentary about why it’s related, why it fits, why a follow-up was written, etc. It’s possible with the new footnotes feature that might be one way this is fleshed out over time.
It’s too much like a crapshoot using a machine only. Not bagging on the plugin, it’s one of the best out there at what it does, but sometimes the results are as unrelated as the Sphere example above.
Machine or (wo)man
Let me throw Jason’s post a better bone to end on than the Sphere link. The wise linkers of the web today are mindful of what happens to the source of those links tomorrow and beyond. That is, if they want to continue to receive search traffic tomorrow and build reader confidence in the links found on their sites.
There’s a very good reason that top search engine Google rewards related linkage in its algorithm and it’s my belief that they will lean even more extreme on this algorithm going forward. Blogs that refuse to manage linkrot in their backyard are as they get older in for a search engine beating.
Google already promotes a lot of blog posts when they are fresh but as time goes on, the blog post is treated less favorably. I see this every day with blog posts made here. In the beginning they rank high, but as time goes on the rankings fade — and so does the resulting traffic.
Some posts this doesn’t happen though, which suggests a strategy one could employ to help more of their blog posts stay relevant.
These non-fading blog posts are often the ones that continue to receive updates and links in from external sites. The latter is out of the blogger’s control, but the former can be controlled. An update to an archived post can come in the form of a comment made, update to the bottom of the original post, basically anything that alters the text on the page. There are good search engine related reasons to revisit archived posts.
Please note that I’m not suggesting changing history. The way updates are handled here are in the form of dates and/or footnotes so that readers can clearly determine what is old and what is new.
If you are a blogger who cares about continuing to receive quality search engine traffic, then watch how many of your links point to nowhere (404) and/or have been redirected somewhere besides what you intended to link. Google offers webmasters a list of links on their sites that lead to 404 and encourages webmasters to fix these broken links. From experience the absolute worst offenders of linkrot are mainstream news sites. Yes, the very sites Jason’s post is suggesting you’d be foolish not to link to that I emphasized in his quote at the top of this post.
Hmm.
So which is it: link to news sites or not?
The answer is both. Wait, how can that be? I’ve been thinking a lot about this question lately and have a few suggestions.
Jason is correct that linking to news sites is important, especially when they are the best source of what you are writing about. You should strive to add links when and where they are necessary.
The problem is that (too) many of these news sites often use page links that expire. Even Google with their own AP articles are expiring news stories. This means if you link to them today in a blog post in a couple months those links will turn 404.
From related to dead
What is needed is a way to link to pages until that link goes 404 and then linking to a cache copy or removing the link when no cache is available. This way people that visit your page will continue to be able to understand the full context. As much as I’d love to point to this solution right now or offer it as a download, I’m empty-handed.
The third party Wordpress plugin I shared recently in How To Manage Dead Links In WordPress goes part way toward fixing the problem. It identifies which of the links in posts are problematic and gives you an option to edit/remove the link. It needs to be automated one step further to link up the cache page when the link goes 404 so you don’t have to manually fix the link. Maybe I should drop the plugin author a suggestion to add this or maybe even work out the code myself and share that back with the world at large.
Wish I could report that the anti-linkrot process is anything but time consuming, but that would be a lie. This blog still has over 1,800 links to go through and edit/remove here in posts made over the last 5+ years.
Where do we go now? Links are web children-like
A Guns N’ Roses Sweet Child O’ Mine reference to swoop for the close. Maybe it’s worth thinking of your links as web children of sorts? No, not in an overprotective parental sense, but in a cautious and responsible way. Linking out to other sites is an important part of the web and having some plan to deal with inevitable linkrot is an important part of any link discussion.
Guess that’s what got me started on this post. Jason’s post doesn’t discuss linkrot. So many articles and posts I read out there skip discussing what happens to links in your posts tomorrow and beyond.
Blogs or any medium that is focused too much on today will become yesterday tomorrow. Not trying to be profound there, it’s common sense. Some people I’ve spoken to say they don’t care what happens to links in archive posts or mistakes or updating/correctly any archived post. That it wasn’t worth the time to fix.
But how important is this post to a first time visitor five years from now?
So for the record, unless you can vet related posts from external sites, it’s more useful to readers to just end your posts. We don’t need or want links to unrelated external sites and ads. This is the kind of thing that drives people to filtering RSS feeds and ignoring websites altogether.
