Shooting at Bubbles

There are times where I really wonder if there is a different brand of kool-aid that bloggers start drinking the more popular they become. Not that long ago we had Robert Scoble in one of his few and far between blog posts suggesting that commenting on blogs; an integral part of blogging and discussions, was going to disappear. Now today we have Louis Gray suggesting that links aren’t important anymore either to which Stan Schroeder of Mashable says he agrees with the premise but not how Louis got there.

Well I hate to be the one to tell these two gentlemen but you’ve been drinking too much of Robert’s kool-aid. The idea that the only value of links is because of the traffic that they might bring to a blog is not what links are meant for. They are a nice added bonus if they do send traffic your way but links are much more important for two other reasons which are totally different from each other but equally important.

At their most basic use – that of linking to posts by other authors – links are a way to provide attribution for either ideas or actual sources of quotes being used. Whether you link to someone else’s post because they have written something that provided you with the basis of your own post or because you are quoting a section of theirs it is the one way that we have to credit someone for their work. By doing that we also affect their value for the second reason that links are important.

It doesn’t matter what search engine you use these days they all use link counts at some point in their algorithms to rank one item over another when they return search results. This in turn helps provide relevance when we are searching on a subject as these links show how others have related to any given subject. Without links there is a key indicator of value that is taken out of the equation and has a direct effect on the types of results we will get.

Having posts without links is like a tree out in the middle of nowhere waving to get our attention but we have no way to see it. Many smarter people before me have said that links are the very glue that hold the blogosphere together and no matter how much the social media mavens might want us to think otherwise we need them.

I find this equally interesting that statements like these come from people who have for all intents and purposes made it as bloggers. For them they might not think that links are important anymore or that Google only sees them as links but for those bloggers who are not in that rarified space and continuum links are their lifeblood that provides them with a way to gauge their growth forward. I wonder how quickly that air of superiority would change if the links to them and about them dried up.