Internet Business Blog

Stu’s posted 11 reasons why my blog might suck. I don’t think most apply (I’ll await his review of my blog before responding to the rest), but here’s my response to those that might.

1. You use nofollow in your links. You expect me to come to your blog and interact with you, give you free content, but not get value for my link? No thanks! Currently, I’m undecided as to whether or not I want to join the no-nofollow revolution. I agree that nofollow is a sucky solution to a problem that Google have, but commentators at this blog can get link love in other ways:

1. I use the Top Commentators plug-in which rewards the… Wait for it… Top commentators of each month! People looking specifically for link love just have to comment perhaps once a month (my blog ain’t overflowing with comments) in order to get a direct link that will pass PR. Even if the post in which the comment was placed sinks into the archive sub-pages, the Top Commentator links sit right on my home page.
2. Engage me in discussion just like Stu has done with the post that this is responding to. Not only does he get a link, but I’m also drawing the attention of anyone reading this right at his blog.

6. You don’t publish an easy to find link to an RSS feed. I’m not coming to your blog every day to see if you’ve updated it. If I can’t find your RSS feed, I can’t subscribe to your feed.

If you use a decent browser, such as Firefox, then you’ll have an ultra-easy method of subscribing to my blog’s RSS feed as the following big red arrow suggests…

11. You cloak/redirect affiliate links. As I said in point 2 above, I have no problem with you wanting to make money. If you post a review of a product which I think I might want to buy, I’m happy for you to get your cut of the action. But why do you need to send me through www.yourblog.com/affiliateproduct.html and then do a redirect to the affiliate site? If you want to track the amount of clicks through the link, get some better stat tracking software.

The main reason why I use these types of redirects and that’s because it allows me to control where the destination URL is pointing. Let’s say I write about and promote widgets over the course of a year using the ugly, dynamic format of affiliate link e.g. widgetsupplier.com?aid=123, but then the merchant decides to change the format of their affiliate links to something different. In an instant, every one of my affiliate links would have been rendered useless.

On a website that I control, I’d have to find every instance of that affiliate URL and replace it with the new one. For anything else such as a PDF report sitting on someone’s hard drive, I’ve lost an opportunity.

Alternatively, if I use a redirect then I only have to change it once and no matter where I’ve used it, it will be up-to-date.

This is why I don’t like to rely on services like snipurl because they take away the control of your links. If their website goes down, all of your snipurl links go with it.

Another factor to consider is that using these redirected affiliate links allows you to get relevant keywords into your posts.  This means that your affiliate links will appear for relevant searches on your blog and perhaps even on a third party search engine.

Technorati Tags: nofollow, ifollow, rss feeds, Affiliate links,