As you probably already know, links make the blogging world go round, and if you want to get noticed, read by more people, or just improve your various stats, then you need people linking to you.

But why should people link to you? Well hopefully it’s because they like what you’ve written, and want more people to see it, which of course is exactly the reason you should link to other people. But there are other benefits to you linking out such as:

• Awareness: People love to know what others are writing about them, and on receiving a link, 99% of bloggers will check out the linker.
• Karma: It’s often true that people you link to will return the favour if they like your blog - obviously that shouldn’t be why you do it, but it’s a nice side benefit.
• Pingbacks: These will appear automatically on most other blogs and will link back to your site.

That’s right, link to other blogs and get a link straight back.

How It works

Now it’s true that this depends on 1. The blogger you’re linking to having pingbacks enabled, and 2. a DoFollow plugin installed, but these days most blogs will accept pingbacks and increasing numbers (including myself) have enabled DoFollow.

So all that you have to do is link to another bloggers post (not the homepage) and your pingback should appear in the comments as an excerpt from your post. If DoFollow is enabled, this will count as a linkback to your site, which not only attracts the attention of the blogger you’re writing about, but also their commenters, as well as being another plus point on your road to improved stats.

I’m happy to accept pingbacks to any of my posts, and as DoFollow is enabled they will count as a link back to you. I was reminded of all this today, by a post on Untwisted Vortex about preserving your incoming pings. I had noticed that if people linked to multiple posts of mine (or if I linked within a post to more than one other article) that not all of the pings showed up. This is because WordPress has a default setting to prevent more than one pingback from a blog appearing within 15 seconds. So if somebody links to 3 of my posts from one of their posts, not all of the pingbacks get through. Happily this is all fixed with this simple plugin.

This was obviously an anti-spam measure, which the plugin still maintains by limiting it to 5 pingbacks within the 15 seconds, but it’s just more generous than the WP defaults which binned the others. Talking of Untwisted Vortex….

Blog Reviews

This tip is just one of the many useful pieces of information I’ve picked up from RT in the months I’ve been following his blog. Along with the technical tips, plugin news and blog tweaks, RT also goes to great lengths to help promote his readers blogs, with Diggs & Stumbles, help and advice and regular linkbacks via his blog drive-bys.

Currently RT is offering reviews to anyone that asks, and as you can see by reading my review, it’s no soft-soap love-in, you’ll get some solid constructive advice out of it too. You don’t have to do anything other than ask to get a review, but I think that’s too generous - the least you can do is subscribe to his feed, I don’t think you’ll regret it.