I recently posted a link to this blog on a website, and almost immediately, the website owner retorted with
"If you insist on posting links to your blog on my website, at least have the decency to link to the original article from within your post. It's just good manners".
(In fact, I didn't stumble across her site until after I'd published the post!)
What she says suggests a form of Internet Etiquette exists - something I don't think I've ever even thought about before. The link I posted was relevent to the discussion, and I just figured that readers of her website would be interested....(or not!!). So I figured I'd better find out a bit more....so put 'internet etiquette' into Google, to be met with thousands of pages about this very topic! I feel rather ignorant! For more on 'Netiquette' click here.
Wednesday, 14 May 2008
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5 comments:
I'm a "him" actually!
Sorry if I was a bit terse, I've had a story we uncovered taken by The Times without any credit for it. The BBC and PA press releases gave us credit, however The Times chose not to.
The netiquette around link exchange is all to do with search engine rankings and advertising. If you post on my site (which has good ranking in search engines), then your blog goes up in the rankings. However, if you don't return the favour, my ranking doesn't get strengthened. This is why its good manners to link to the original source - it helps search engines find the original content.
Also, when linking in articles its a good idea to *only* link the relevant words (although I'm also guilty of not always doing this).
For example, the article I was whining about originally you have the following text linked to Kingston University website: "Kingston University ringing alarm bells". The most search-engine friendly link would be to link "Kingston University" to the Kingston site, and "ringing alarm bells" to the original source - preferably Live!, but possibly the BBC News page which referenced us.
It also helps your readers find the context of your blog entry.
Oh and have a look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog_spam
Posting links on blogs is generally considered spam, and is also quite often killed off by "spam filters".
A little bit of blurb about why you think the link is relevant often helps!
Haha, apologies MR Ashley!
That's ok. Like I said, I don't think it's something I've really thought about before - as odd as it may sound!
Following your experience from Murdoch's empire, I can completely understand your stance!
I didn't realise the affect posting had on rankings - so I'm glad we met!
Cheers!
I neglected to mention the advertising side: high page rank and links translates to higher visitor numbers, which means increased advertising revenue for those of us running adverts. Not such a problem for bloggers who do it as a hobby, but for some websites advertising revenue is the only thing keeping them going so getting people to visit is very important.
Of course, we just spend the money on advertising for ourselves or in the bar...!
Indeed - and that's an important point about advertising. Fortunately I don't have that problem!
Hahaha....nowt wrong with drowning your sorrows now and again! Ahem!
Great site btw :)
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