Dennis D. McDonald (ddmcd@ddmcd.com) consults from Alexandria Virginia. His services include writing & research, proposal development, and project management.

Influencing Link Counts - An Experiment

by Dennis D. McDonald

linkedin_bloggers_logo.jpgI'm a moderator at the Linkedin Bloggers group on Yahoo!. Linkedin is an online professional networking group with more than 5 million members worldwide.

Linkedin Bloggers is a members-only sub-group of Linkedin members who have created the group to discuss issues related to blogging and professional networking. The group is growing. We've decided to try an experiment we call "blog boosting." We've randomly selected one of the group members' regularly updated blogs -- in this case Itzy Sabo's Email Overloaded -- and group members have agreed to write about and link to Itzy's blog today, March 1, 2006. Those services reporting blog and web links will thus see a "bump" in mentions of Itzy's blog, and this may in turn impact Itzy's rankings from various services.

How much will this "bump" mean to Itzy and to  anyone who takes the time to also comment on Itzy's blog and leave a link back? In Itzy's case, he experiencede quite a bump in his traffic. To hear what he said about the experience, and for an excellent lesson in site traffic analysis, check out the podcast Robyn Tippins and I made when we intervewed Itzy for The Podcast Roundtable:

In this podcast Itzy describes the powerful impact an initial 13 linkers had on his blog’s readership. Also discussed are the various stages the boost process went through, the different measures used to track the impact, and the “ethics” of the blog boost process itself.

Would you like to comment on this article? I'd love to hear from you! Please use the comment function below or send an email to Dennis D. McDonald at ddmcd@yahoo.com

 

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