Is The Link Industry Killing Relationships and Personality in Blogs?
A favorite writer, Liz Strauss recently wrote over at the Blog Herald about the dichotomy between relationships and information when it comes to the Web.
What is a link? Is a link clicks and traffic and Google rankings? Or does a link represent that I know you, that I’ve read your content, that you’re relevant and of value to me? Is a comment conversation or something I can buy or rent?
We’re living in two Internets. It looks much like the companies we find in the world of brick and mortar. One is about places, information, and data. It’s the buildings in which people work. The other is about people, relationships, and conversation. It’s the people who work in those buildings. One is a structure. The other is social
From her articles, I’ve come to know Liz as a relationship blogger, so she highly values relationships in her blogging activities. I doubt if she sells ad space or text links on her personal blogs. Who she writes about, you’ll be sure she’s personally recommending them, by way of linking.
When I started blogging, it was mostly personal. My blog was about my life. Sure, it sounds corny, but a good majority of bloggers are blogging on personal matters. Blogs are their online diaries, and not their soapboxes and online newsmagazines. So on my personal online journal, I linked to sites and other bloggers that I found interesting. Back then, the concept of paid links was still not as prevalent as it is today.
But then blogs became popular among search marketers and optimizers for their link value. If you could get a link from an A-lister, not only would you get traffic, but also good link juice. Or if you can’t get quality, you could at least get quantity. And the text link industry was born. Now you see sponsored blog posts and reviews everywhere. Sometimes it’s weird how people would insert paid links within their paragraphs, even though the anchor text is unrelated. Sometimes people would incessantly post, several times per day, just to meet pay per post quotas, (quality drops significantly in these cases, in my observation). You don’t know what’s real anymore.
Going back to Liz’s point, it seems there’s nothing really wrong with being informational instead of social on your blog. I think the point is that blogs these days are becoming more and more impersonal. Pretty soon, the concept of blogs as personal journals might be a thing of the past.
There’s nothing wrong with being informational or relational, but in the end, it seems that the longest lasting results happen when head and heart are together at the same time.
One without the other seems like only half of the picture.
Liz Strauss said this on May 30, 2007 2:39 am