Twitter. MyBlogLog. MySpace. These sites all have a few things in common, but the one I’m concerned with is the ability of allowing users to link their own sites. Allowing users to link to their sites seems relatively unimportant (sometimes irrelevant) until you think about how the web has changed. Now nearly everyone has a website, and nearly everyone thinks people should go to their website. For people to get to your site, you generally need links to the site. That’s the basic rule of SEM. A smart user of a site that allows you to link to your website won’t just link to their website, they feverishly add friends to their account. The more friends they have, the more pages there are linking to their user page on the site. The more links to their user page, the more important search engines think the page is, and thus the more valuable the link back to the users own site becomes. My guess is that this easy type of linking is greatly facilitating the ability of a number of sites to “be viral.” This is just one of the numerous things one should consider when developing a social networking site (or any type of site requiring an account) and one that I’m considering as I prepare to redo and redefine how social aspects are handled on Lopico.
« the last post? • Update »
2 comments
Comments feed for this article
Trackback link
http://jdamer.com/wordpress/2007/04/15/sns-and-the-art-of-the-link/trackback/
April 16, 2007 at 7:21 am
George Nemeth
Most blogs and bloggers probably don’t take the approach that I do, but I’m very defensive of BFD as a brand. I would much rather integrate services like twitter and flickr into my blog, then send traffic away from it. I do that enough by highlighting other bloggers in Northeast Ohio.
April 16, 2007 at 8:08 am
JDA
And you’ve done a great job of building the BFD brand and helping many bloggers in Northeast Ohio. The BFD approach is much more respectable than that taken by a number of new sites. That’s why you’ve built a brand and not a 15 minutes of fame site (like either MyBlogLog or Twitter is going to be).
I guess my question is whether some of the new sites that come about are really that great or if there is just a mad rush to get outbound links, followed by heavy usage to get friends on a site (to increase the value of those links), followed by a big drop off (http://tinyurl.com/2wje72) ? I’m not saying that this is true for all services and I’m not saying that this is the motivation for most or even all users - but Twitter is little more than a glorified away message. For some the main motivation for using the service is to link back to their own site - that’s a good way to build quick hype, but not a way to build a brand.