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I got a couple of great questions today from an FTR reader and wanted to share the answer I emailed him today.
Questions: Hi Jack, I have been looking at Utility [Poster] and have a question. Bringing in content from other blogs is going to send people to other sources/blogs.
Would that not defeat the purpose of having visitors stay on my blog as long as possible until they subscribe to my list? Also is there any penalty with this tool for having 2 way links or are track backs considered one way? Utility [P]oster in every other way looks awesome. Thank you for your response.
My Answer:
Good questions!
Trackbacks have been a mainstay in the blogging community since blogs came out and subsequently found their way to being the favorite type of site Google and others like to rank. In fact, the rankings of blogs and their performance on the engines speaks volumes to the power of how blogs link to each other.
Bloggers have long known that sending traffic away from their sites is a benefit TO their marketing, not a detriment. Every high-traffic, successful blogger on the web sends traffic away from his/her blog every week. With glee in their hearts. Knowing that their recommendations to their readers cement a relationship that cannot be won any other way.
Readers DO subscribe. They follow these blogs with RSS, email, and very regular visitation because they trust the blogger’s “picks” and recommendations and cannot get enough.
Linking to other sites is a big reason why TechCrunch has over 3,735,000 RSS subscribers and over 58,000 fans on Facebook. They link to other sites in almost every post they make.
If the site they link to is a blog, that blog willingly links back as a badge of honor that TechCrunch.com linked to them in the first place.
Google understands this relationship and does not place the same scrutiny on it as it does reciprocal linking for the sole sake of engine manipulation. Again, that’s obvious by looking at the sheer success of these types of blogs that link out and do trackbacks as a mainstay of their marketing campaigns.
The difference is that two blog sites are communicating in a relevant “discussion” with each other. On the flip side, where raw reciprocal linking from one site to another, and for no apparent reason other than the site owners think it will help them, the tactic utterly fails. And for good reason. There’s no discussion or relevancy between the two sites that exchange links solely to see if they can cheat their way into the engines. Like between a car site and a dog site. Google is way way smarter than that and will catch it every time.
My Recommendation: When you hear SEO advice, even if its from Matt Cutts, always test it against live search results and by looking at the sites themselves. The old argument in amateur SEO circles that trackbacks are like irrelevant reciprocal links is shown to be completely false in the face of real, verifiable-by-anybody search results and sites you find where it is easy to see why they are wildly successful. Those sites use trackbacks and send people away from their sites for a living and they range from relatively new blogs to the most successful blogs on the planet.
The tactic trickles all the way down to new blogs with equal effectiveness and has no apparent loss or gain in effectiveness dependent on the size, newness, or popularity of the site.
Thanks for the great questions!
- (More information on Utility Poster)
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