{"id":3520,"date":"2007-02-24T01:53:37","date_gmt":"2007-02-23T15:53:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/problogger.com\/secret-confessions-of-a-link-a-holic\/"},"modified":"2007-02-23T22:32:31","modified_gmt":"2007-02-23T12:32:31","slug":"secret-confessions-of-a-link-a-holic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/problogger.com\/secret-confessions-of-a-link-a-holic\/","title":{"rendered":"Secret Confessions of a Link-A-Holic"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/cml\/241395048\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/problogger.com\/wp-content\/link-1.jpg?resize=225%2C150&#038;ssl=1\" height=\"150\" width=\"225\" border=\"0\" align=\"left\" hspace=\"10\" vspace=\"10\" alt=\"Link-1\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>Is it just me or has everyone been becoming a little &#8216;link obsessed&#8217; lately?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This week I&#8217;ve been counting the number of posts I&#8217;ve seen written about getting links for your blog &#8211; I&#8217;m over 40 and still counting.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<strong>Posts I&#8217;ve seen this week so far have covered:<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>How to ask for links<\/li>\n<li>What type of links to ask other bloggers for<\/li>\n<li>How to write content that is linkable<\/li>\n<li>What type of links are best<\/li>\n<li>What type of sites to target for links<\/li>\n<li>How to do internal links on your blog<\/li>\n<li>How to get .edu links<\/li>\n<li>Link building tips<\/li>\n<li>Linkbaiting techniques<\/li>\n<li>How to get links that increase traffic<\/li>\n<li>How to buy links effectively<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\nThe list goes on&#8230;. and on&#8230;..\n<\/p>\n<p>\nNot only have I seen a lot of posting about links, this week I&#8217;ve had around 40 emails from bloggers &#8216;asking for link exchanges&#8217; (not including all the emails with suggestions for posts that others have written).\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<strong>So what&#8217;s my problem with all the link building articles and exchanging links? Am I &#8216;anti link?&#8217;<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>No &#8211; that&#8217;s not it, I believe that SEO has a place in blogging and that one of the most powerful ways to grow in your search engine ranking is to build incoming links to your site. I&#8217;ve written many times about this and have covered a lot of the topics in the list above here at ProBlogger. I value the incoming links that I have to my blogs and would like to see their numbers keep growing.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nHowever this week my alarm bells have been going off and I&#8217;m starting to wonder if we (as a blogging community) might be getting a little <strong>distracted<\/strong> from&#8230;. from&#8230;. well blogging itself.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nTwo main thoughts come to mind:\n<\/p>\n<p><h3>1. Blog Holistically<\/h3>\n<p>Beware any type of blogging obsession. I&#8217;ve talked about the <a href=\"https:\/\/problogger.com\/theres-a-hole-in-my-blog\/\">temptations that bloggers face to focus in on one aspect of blogging at the expense of others<\/a> &#8211; link building is one of those that can lead to blog destruction. Give it some attention by all means &#8211; but keep things in balance and realize that of all the factors that make up a successful blog &#8211; incoming links is at best midway through the list.\n<\/p>\n<p><h3>2. Blog well and the links will follow <\/h3>\n<p>This might be easy for me to say as a reasonably established blogger &#8211; but I&#8217;m a big believer in the principle. How do most of the top bloggers going around build their readership? From talking to a few of them I&#8217;d humbly suggest that the main thing in their favor was that they built blogs with compelling content which engaged their readers &#8211; the links followed.\n<\/p>\n<p><h3>My Secret Link Obsession<\/h3>\n<p>Let me let you in on a little secret. I&#8217;m a recovering link-a-holic.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nIn my early days of blogging I stumbled across the idea of incoming links as the key to SEO and so I began a campaign of gathering links to my blogs (at the time I only had a couple).\n<\/p>\n<p>\nI wasn&#8217;t all that blog-savvy at the time and so did a pretty crude job of it (I bought a few links, I tried to exchange links, I got into listing my blogs in directories) but I managed to increase the numbers of links to my blogs over time. In the process here&#8217;s what else happened:\n<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>My posting frequency dropped<\/li>\n<li>Readers became frustrated with my content (which was obviously linkbait)<\/li>\n<li>I lost some of my passion for blogging and my topic<\/li>\n<li>I sold out content wise (started picking topics to write about that didn&#8217;t really add value to my blog)<\/li>\n<li>I started watching my metrics more than the news in my industry<\/li>\n<li>Frustration crept into my blogging when the links didn&#8217;t come<\/li>\n<li>My Page Rank increased &#8211; but my actual SERPs (the position of my blog in search engines) dropped<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\nIt wasn&#8217;t until I took a step back from blogging for a week at one point that I realized how distracted I&#8217;d become and how the very thing that I thought would &#8216;make&#8217; my blog was in danger of killing it.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nI decided to focus again on my readers and on producing content that would be useful to them and in doing so saw a reversal in all of the above points.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nDo I think about incoming links these days as a blogger? Yes I do &#8211; they are one aspect of blogging that is important. However as a recovering link-a-holic I attempt to keep that side of my blogging well in check. I think my blogs and I are in a lot better shape for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Is it just me or has everyone been becoming a little &#8216;link obsessed&#8217; lately? This week I&#8217;ve been counting the number of posts I&#8217;ve seen written about getting links for your blog &#8211; I&#8217;m over 40 and still counting. Posts I&#8217;ve seen this week so far have covered: How to<a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/problogger.com\/secret-confessions-of-a-link-a-holic\/\"> &#8230;more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,12],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Secret Confessions of a Link-A-Holic<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Is it just me or has everyone been becoming a little &#039;link obsessed&#039; lately? This week I&#039;ve been counting the number of.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/problogger.com\/secret-confessions-of-a-link-a-holic\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Secret Confessions of a Link-A-Holic\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Is it just me or has everyone been becoming a little &#8216;link obsessed&#8217; lately? This week I&#8217;ve been counting the number of posts I&#8217;ve seen written about getting links for your blog &#8211; I&#8217;m over 40 and still counting. Posts I&#8217;ve seen this week so far have covered: How to ...more\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/problogger.com\/secret-confessions-of-a-link-a-holic\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"ProBlogger\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/problogger\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2007-02-23T15:53:37+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2007-02-23T12:32:31+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/problogger.com\/wp-content\/link-1.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Darren Rowse\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@ProBlogger\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@ProBlogger\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Darren Rowse\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. 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