Blogs and Search Engine Optimization - Blogs and Incoming Links
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One of the first things you will notice about most blogs is that they possess vast lists of outgoing links. At first glance, the thought is that these sites are leaking a lot of PageRank. That might be true, but the concept of PageRank leak remains controversial, and unproven to everyone's satisfaction.
Many of the links you see on the blog are reciprocated. Many are not. The collection of links is not the main goal of most bloggers. The outgoing links are simply there as a service to the readers. There are usually a lot of outgoing links found in the daily blog entries. Again, linking is a prominent feature of the blog. Those are only the links that are leaving the site.
What you don't see are the links coming into the blog. Bloggers are very heavy linkers. They link to other blogs and websites freely and generously. Concerns about PageRank rarely arise, and is a non-issue to many bloggers. The focus of the vast majority of blog writers is the reader. If the topic is interesting to the blog owner, it is linked and offered freely to the blog readership.
That free range linking works both ways. Natural incoming links abound. Not all blog links are reciprocal links. On the other hand, bloggers will happily exchange links with other writers, if they find the blog to be an interesting one. In the blogging community, linking to one another is a very frequent event.
For those who are concerned about reciprocal links being penalized by Google, that has not been a problem thus far for blogs. In fact, a quick backlink check shows abundant reciprocal links. They are not penalized, perhaps, because the links are almost always from the blog home page. Link sections and pages, common for traditional websites, are rarely found on blogs.
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