A cross-promotion idea
Earlier today Merrilee passed the prolific blogger award to Anna, who duly passed it on to me (and six others).
I kind of panicked because I'm not a great blog reader (too much time reading webfiction) but while I did eventually pull 7 other blogs out of my brainspace my first thought was if I had to tag seven great weblit authors I probably could.
Then I thought "hmmm"
Then I tweeted the following to Anna
"@quillsandzebras seven other bloggers who you haven't already tagged? ... *mind goes blank*"
"@quillsandzebras though this does give me a cross-promotion idea. What about a similar thing but for #weblit writers rather than bloggers?"
Anna's reply was:
"@shutsumon That is a genius idea - and we could also use Mr Linky for it. But the problem is, not many #weblit people have blogs, & they >>"
"@shutsumon >> might not want to interrupt their story content with a post about the award."
Which is a fair comment.
Anyway my basic thought on this is that it's not a real award but a kind of a link-building chain scheme, but for all that no money is at stake, and no one is being asked to do anything dishonest. You nominate people you think deserve the linkage anyway.
But there are a few issues.
1. the issue Anna raises is a good one - not every #weblit writer blogs and some won't want to annoy their readers with non-story updates.
2. It may be an inoffensive chain scheme but it's still a chain scheme. The starter page is going to get a heck of a lot of link love. Everyone involved gets link love but the first page gets a link from every nominee who plays along. Even with Mr Linky that means the starter gets the most benefit. This goes against my sense of fair play.
I do, however, see a solution.
1. We need the initial nominator to be someone like @Janoda - if she's willing - who's a weblit advocate but not a weblit author. From there the tagged authors take over but no one author gets an unfair link boost.
2. If @Janoda is willing perhaps the starting post could be hosted on Ergofiction? After all it benefits all of us to promote Ergofiction as a hub site so aiming tons of links there is a good thing.
3. A solution to the problem of blogless #weblit authors is harder, but surely solvable. Allowing guest posting on another blog by blogless authors maybe?
So what do people think? Am I really a genius as Anna said, or is this the stupidest idea since Eve decided that apple looked really tasty?
Becka
Hmm... interesting... what are the possible SEO implications of this?
I have another thought about it... that we set a rule that if we're nominating three other writers, one of them has to be someone we don't know. We have to go out and find their work and nominate it because we genuinely like their writing, not because they're a friend. That way we are expanding the community and the variety of offerings.
*shrugs* Presumeably, you'd link to others using their name as the anchor text, which would boost their SEO for that term. You'd be making a handful of outbound links, but you'd receive some inbound links as well. All in all, I think it'd even out. I don't see this as an SEO tactic so much as a word-of-mouth thing.
@Gabriel Yes, I agree on the lower number. Three or four seems ideal.
@Karen It should be a good thing. Links the glue of the web and spiders follow them to find your site. And search engines are popularity contests - one of the ways they judge your site is by how many baclinks it has. That's why I talked about the number of backlinks the competition had in my Saturday SEO posting. Also the tagging links would occur in postings rather than on a dedicated 'links' page. Googlebot and its cousins are known to give more weight to links that have good context (ie appear in articles and posts rather than simply being part of a big list).
The only problem I can think of which might occur is if googlebot et al thought something spammy was happening. It's very unlikely though and a lower number of links and decent context surrounding said links should avoid any problems.
Becky
Hey!
I like the idea.
I'm swamped with work right now.
I'll come back with my thoughts on the execution later.
However, I'm a bit wary because we try to keep our neutrality as high as possible. Picking 3 to start with might seem like we're not that neutral. So I have to think about how we would start.
A poll maybe?
Or start with the top three on topwebfiction that day?
It's also worth mentioning that in every set, you'll have a few people that won't pass the chain along. That's not really an issue, but people without blogs could be among that group.
I do think this should be pretty limited. I don't like the idea of it being seven or eight. In my opinion, it's far more beneficial to limit it to 1, 2, or maybe 3 authors, but specify that you have to say WHY you're nominating them, even if it's just a few lines.
I see this is a bit like the follow friday thing on Twitter. Whenever I've received a singular mention with a good reason why I should be followed, I get a lot more followers than if I'm lumped into a tweet with twelve other people's names.
Gabriel Gadfly :: Weblit Poetry, Short Fiction, and Resources