One of our readers asked a very good question today, and I would like to share her question and what my response was. At first glance you may think her question is very simple, but I feel it certainly indicates she is very wise in that she is wanting to exercise caution when linking. As a new blogger, she in my opinion, is quite smart for recognizing that importance!

Her question along with my reply provided a great opportunity for a post here in that it allows me to express further the importance of practicing good seo when you exchange links. This was her question:

I’m new to blogging and I looked at your site, and was wondering how do you exchange links? And, what does it do to your original blogs?

This was my reply to her question, and I hope I addressed what she was wanting to know, and I also elaborated a bit more here as I posted this for your reading:

I encourage bloggers to exchange links within either relevant posts, or posts which have some of the same keywords in common. In other words, say blogger A has a cat blog, and blogger B has a dog blog. They can create relevancy by posting about a keyword they both have in common such as “pet”.

For the blog reader it’s good because the reader clicks through the link to the other blogs post and they find it has relevancy; in this case because both blogs are writing about pets. That is also favored among search engines because their robots also note that the linking blog posts have relevancy. So, it’s a good practice for seo (search engine optimization), and for their readers.

In contrast, if bloggers exchange links within say their sidebar, but their blogs have no common ground it can turn off the reader, and it’s not as favored by the search engines such as the Google bot either. If a blog has too many outgoing links to unrelated posts or blogs that isn’t favorable for either the human reader, or for the search engines.

As an example, on one of my blogs I write about sailing adventures on the high seas. If I posted a bunch of links in my sidebar to cat or dog blogs (as an example), my readers will get turned off as well as the search engines.

So, long story short - keep relevancy in mind as it is a very important key to linking. The more incoming backlinks your blog acquires, the greater your page rank will rise, and that equates to more traffic from organic searches like from Google, and also boosts your Technorati stats.

If you are the one sending a backlink to another blog keeping relevancy in mind is important. If you are going to link to a blog that does not have common ground with yours, do it in a manner where you at least share common keywords of some sort to creating the relevancy.

If you exercise the dynamics of focusing on relevancy when linking it should not have any negative impact on your blogs. If you do some research over on Google’s site you will find they stress the importance of relevancy when linking in order to practice good seo.

Link popularity has the greatest weight in Google’s algorithm when the links are within content and they lead to relevant content. That’s another reason why you want to become successful at participating in the creation of a Link & Blog Challenge today!