This post is dedicated to webmasters who read Ghacks especially those who run their own blogs and tend to use Ghacks articles as a source at times but basically to anyone who maintains a blog on the Internet and cites his sources.
Most webmasters have the decency to cite their source when they write about a topic that they have encountered on another website which is a good and honest thing to do. Almost all of them on the other hand use anchor names like via or sitename to link back to the website which is probably helping a new blog that wants to establish a name for itself and might help experienced visitors identify the source by reading the name.
It is however not really helping the webmaster who is maintaining the source website.Most search engines (still) rely heavily on anchor names. What you do is you tell the search engines that the source is about via or the sitename but do not give the search engine a single hint as to what the article is really about.
Lets take one basic example. Ghacks writes a post about the latest Firefox update. A brand new story that has not reached the masses yet. Instead of linking to that story using via or ghacks webmasters would do me a much bigger favor by using anchor names like firefox, firefox 3 or firefox update because this would give my article more weight in the search engines.
I have therefor decided to link to other blogs that I cite in my articles properly from now on. The link will contain one major keyword (a keyword can be comprised of one or multiple words) that I have identified in the post on the other website. This will help the other website in their search engine rankings in the major search engines. I will furthermore contact webmasters who link to my articles and ask them if they would like to consider doing the same.
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Will do. :)
Actually I am usually alternating between anchor links and via links depending on what fits my post better. If there are few sources it makes little sense to stuff posts with mutliply lines of long anchor links.
Will do, what’s your website ?
ghacks is a alternative site source of my site.
but i always add a “via” tag to make it clear where the article from …
Hope u ghacks doing better
Chill Martin!
Quality prevails, many dissatisfied Lifehacker readers would turn to gHacks. I did. Hell of late they talk about Weight Loss issues there. LOL!!!
I hate LH, wonder how they managed to get so popular??
You don’t have to crib everytime somebody copies article from your blog. Once people identify the source of the content they would start coming there. I visited your site thanks to DLS article.
You, Digital Inspiration and other few blogs should come together and sue LH, they rob your articles.
I should imagine that anyone who calls himself a webmster would know the value of keywords and anchor text. Still, the blatant obvious is never immediately apparent, as I’ve seen in a mailing list sig recently.
There is an Italian site Geekissimo.com wich lives with your articles, translating what they can to Italian.
Martin, give an example of how a link should look like, so that every one understands well, and implements it that way.
iampriteshdesai: Using a descriptive anchor name is important for the search engines but does not really matter for visitors who visit site a and see the link to site b.
Venkat: Instead of using the sitename for a link webmasters should use a descriptive link. The easiest way is usually to take the title of the story but basically everything is possible that describes the article.
Taking this for example: Webmasters could use “Webmasters. Listen. Please!”, “linking strategy”, “website linking”, “proper linking”, “linking information” or “optimal linking”
I’m happy to do that, indeed I do when I cite sources, but I think it has to be relevant and pertinent in the context of a given post otherwise it can confuse non-SEO-savvy readers who wonder why one has linked on a particular word rather than the site name, for instance.
things that bother me is that you have been asking about this anchor to other bloggers that cites your post as the resources, but you rarely do the same. I could take a screenshot of your posts that links to other posts, blogs, sites that don’t give proper anchor links. The most often is probably when you link to an application. Instead of the name, you anchor another general term such as “program”.
I think you get what you give, Martin.
Done…
hexa I did not claim that I linked properly in the past but said that I would do so from now on. I’m not someone who asks others to do something if he is not up to to the same.
Big blog or small blog, all should get the same treatment!