Feb
13
Last month I asked the readers of Life of a Writer to share suggestions to assist me in my effort to bring something new to the table here at Pure Blogging. I asked them what they’d like to know about blogging, promotion or both that they haven’t read anything about or something they’ve not read a whole lot about. Novice Writer was the first to leave a suggestion, which I will be covering in today’s blog post.
After Novice Writer requested I blog about viral linking, I was not familiar with the topic but decided to research it. During my research, I immediately discovered the disadvantages of viral linking:
1. Links may be irrelevant to your blog. Viral linking includes links to a variety of different blogs, and the viral link list is published on a number of blogs that may not be relevant to your blog. According to Google’s advice for a better SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position) and PR (Page Rank), backlinks to your website or blog should be on other websites or blogs relevant to yours.
2. Links may not be good for family-friendly blogs. The links in a viral link list could go anywhere. What if you have a family-friendly blog and one or more of the blogs in the viral link list takes your blog readers to a pornography website? This could reflect badly on you because your blog is, after all, family friendly. Wouldn’t you agree?
3. Could hurt your SERP. Viral linking reminds me of those sites full of just links, and many search engines frown on you for participating in “link farms” such as this. Therefore, if you’re trying to get a better SERP for your blog or you’re working toward getting your blog listed in the popular search engines, then I’d advise against viral linking.
4. Viral linking has a horrible click-thru rate. Brook Durant at A Blog About Nothing researched his blog’s statistics after participating in viral linking and reported a horrible click-thru rate. “I’ve gotten less than 35 clicks coming in to this blog. Outgoing clicks on viral listed sites has been less than 15. As you can see the CTR for viral links is miserable,” Brook Durant explained.
5. Your blog post could go unread. Many of your blog readers may skip your blog post once they realize the post is a viral link post. Why? Because viral link blog posts don’t provide your readers with what they had hoped to discover on your blog: interesting content. Personally, during my research, I looked at a few viral link blog posts and found them uninteresting, so I was one of those readers who didn’t read the post. All viral linking boils down to is a list of blogs. Readers come to your blog for advice, not for a list of links to blogs that may not even be related to yours.
Now you know the disadvantages of viral linking. Whether you participate is up to you. Just keep in mind that participating might hurt your SERP or PR.
Is there something you’ve not read at all or read much about that you’d like to learn related to blogging, promotion or both? If so, leave your suggestion(s) in the comment area, and if I believe I can cover the topic, I will be more than happy to fulfill your request, too.
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I will not ever try out viral linking since I have the fear of having my blog labeled as a link farm by Google.
Spending my time on social media sites and networking for the marketing of my blog definitely worth more than just joining viral linking programs.
Yes, social media sites and networking are a great way to market your blog as well as any website you may own.
The risk of being penalized by google is enough to make me not even attempt this type of link building campaign. There are so many other good ways to accomplish good PR. Why not ask to trade links with similar PR level, content related websites? It will take some time, but in the end you will have a higher PR and not be penalized.
Participating in Viral linking only shows how much your blog sucks…
I wouldn’t say every blog that participates in or has tried viral linking “sucks,” I just think they’re willing to try new things to market and don’t have a basic understanding of some of the marketing techniques they apply, which is why I wrote this post — to point out the disadvantages.
My best advice for bloggers considering a marketing technique new to them is to research it first. All you have to do is search for the new technique using Google. By doing this, you could find out more and may even see some examples of how it really works.
I am fairly new to blogging and many of the terms fly easily over my head. Your post has helped me tick one more off the list though, at least I have a basic understanding of viral links.
My reaction, before reading about the disadvantages, would have been that any link is a good link. Clearly, that is not so.
I guess as ever, if your content is good enough then people will find it (and want to come back for more).
Steve,
Glad I could help. If links are relevant to your blog, you should be ok, but the best way to get good links is to write quality content. If other bloggers find your content helpful and of good quality, they may link back to your post from their blog.
That was very informative..Indeed good content is the best way for promoting one’s blog! I wont be thinking of viral linking now..Thanks..