A bit of a thumbs down from last weeks poll, with over 50% of voters either actively disliking the link trains or not using them.
For those who chose the first option, a link train is one of those memes where a blogger posts a long list of links, and tags other bloggers to re-publish it with some additions. The second blogger then tags other people to add and republish and so on. There are three main problems that I see with them:
- The links are content free and therefore rank low for relevancy with Google. This means that as the links are not in a body of text, they are not considered relevant to the content of the page, and you may even have your ranking penalized by Google who think you’re a link farm.
- Google can downgrade or even expel from it’s index any blog or website that publishes ‘duplicate content’ i.e. copies material from other sites. If you’re not the originator of the link train, you’re pushing duplicate content.
- Link trains are often hijacked by scammers and spam sites: Find a link train list of any length, and scroll down, you’ll find all manner on ‘interesting’ sites concealed amongst the real blogs. Do you think Google will praise you or punish you for linking to these sites when you post the link train?
Not much going for them is there? They’re not the worst thing you can do as a brand new blog, especially if you’re running a personal blog and are not too concerned with Googles opinion of you, but: Check out all the links, delete the bad ones, and re-write the text at the top to avoid duplicate content. Consider wrapping each link in a one sentence review of the blog as well – this will help relevancy, and the receiving blogger will appreciate it too.
9 users commented in " Sunday Poll Results – Link Trains "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackGood perspective and nice to hear a sane voice.
The “snag” is that the link trains work for those involved in them. My traffic is up considerably over the last month or so, mainly from the technorati favourites exchange train.
I do agree re the “irrelevant” links and will gradually be adding some descriptive text to the faves train list. However, I was quite surprised to find that a lot of the “irrelevant” links aren’t really that irrelevant in the sense that I read a number of posts that I see from them when I login to my Technorati account. In fact, I’ve adopted quite a number of good ideas that I’ve seen for my own blog. There are around five or six from that list that I now read regularly yet would otherwise never have seen.
Anyone who just copies the trains is crazy for sure. I look through all those coming on but in practice have, so far, only had to delete two which were “adult content” sites (nothing hardcore, just less family-friendly than I think is wise to link to for a mainstream blog). I also err on the side of caution with foreign language blogs linking in: if I can’t read it, it ain’t getting linked to.
In essence I quess it is a chain letter of links. Thanks for explaining what they are. This does not seem like something I would want to participate in for the reasons you outlined.
If all a blog is publishing is link trains, I am sure some they won’t rank for very much that is useful.
Links trains that point to your homepage are almost useless.
A link train pointing to deep pages on something that is relevant would be useful, though I am much more likely to respond to a meme that allows me to write some relevant content, though it might take me a while to pass it on.
Thanks guys.
You can definitely get some mileage out of them Arnold, especially if you use them the way you have.
I have to say though that I won’t be doing anymore straight link trains though, like Andy I prefer those that make you think a bit like the Blog Apocalypse or ‘5 blogs’ ones.
It’s interesting that there is so much negative sentiment out there. I would have thought it would have been a little less than 50/50. I think the key thing here is – what stage is your blog at? The more established you are the less attractive these things become.
I guess the real trouble with link trains is that they don’t bring in “real” traffic, at least not directly.
If they (temporarily) boost your rankings more traffic is directed to your site on all sorts of searches… but that doesn’t mean that the directee will stay more than a second or read more than a sentence.
And this is entirely different from refreshing links… which I try and do on a regular basis… but only in context.
I’m guilty with this one.I’ve been on 3 train since starting my blog.
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