Hey, I noticed you haven't subscribed yet! If you'd like to be notified the next time I write something, you may want to sign-up for email alerts or subscribe to the RSS/Atom feed. Thanks for reading!

Yes, this post is a rant! Well, an educational rant of sorts. I’m tired of seeing blogs doing link trains. If you have a link train currently running, this isn’t anything personal against you…it’s against the link train! I decided quite a while ago that I would never do a link train. Link trains are the blog equivalency of unsolicited “put your choice body part here”-enlargement email spam.

Ok, so many people may be asking what a link train is. A link train is basically a list of links that someone starts on their blog and asks that other blogs copy that original list and add their own site at the bottom. Once you’ve copied the list and added your own link to the bottom, you would ask others to do the same. Usually there’s some lame article or short description at some part of the list so people don’t get penalized from search engines for duplicate content. I’ll give you an example of what a link train looks like…

This is what the list might look like when I get it off of someone else’s blog:

• This is Eric’s site: www.exampleofericssite.com
• This is John’s site: www.exampleofjohnssite.com
• This is Ella’s site: www.exampleofellassite.com

After I copy the list, and publish it on my blog, it might look like this:

• I love Eric’s site: www.exampleofericssite.com
• John’s site is interesting: www.exampleofjohnssite.com
• Ella is smart: www.exampleofellassite.com
• Joe’s site is also interesting: www.joemidway.com

Now, you may be wondering what the benefit of a link train is to a site that is actually willing to do one. Basically what a link train does is, it provides your blog or website with a ton of backlinks. The benefit of this in the short-run is that more backlinks give your website more authority with the search engines. I’ll get to why I say “short-run” in a minute.

My rant is not that link trains don’t work at the moment, they do for what they were designed - to get you backlinks. I said “short-run” before because Google, Technorati and others are getting smarter all the time. They continually update their algorithms and I can tell you that they do not like people using blackhat or greyhat techniques and will/do eventually punish them. If you condone using link trains, then you should know that you’re also condoning word-stuffing and other blackhat techniques. Just think, what do your readers want to read? What good is a post filled with junk that has no relation to your blog or to your readers?

I should also tell you that link trains are different than a few linking techniques that may seem similar. For example, if you make a list of links that you actually endorse or think have value, then that’s great! Or, maybe you’re making a list of sites that you’re reviewing. Maybe you’re running a contest and are asking people for backlinks, etc. These are all fair trade-offs. Themed link trains, are borderline because they might have relevant links for your site and it’s a good way to inform people of different sites that are related to yours. Just think of a link train almost like a pyramid scheme…after-all, the person who started the train is getting the best deal since he/she will be on the shortest lists (which will get the most hits) as well as be at the top (if no one “cheated”) of the longer lists.

I forgot to mention the best part of link trains! They can get you banned from Google! You may ask “how will Google ever know?”. Trust me, they have many ways…such as asking for input from other websites. I took the following list directly from Google’s guidelines:

Quality guidelines - basic principles

• Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
• Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Now none of the above says anything about banning your site or punishing you, but if you know how the Google ranking (or PageRank) algorithm works, you will realize that all of the above-mentioned will result in ranking penalties among other things. This is all just food for thought, and another reason why you should be blogging for content and not search engine ranking ;-). Let me know what you think on the matter or if you disagree!

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

 Loading ...