Applying Link Analysis to Blogger
Back when I was in high school, I used to actively maintain my own blog on Blogger to publish some of my 3-D modeling work. I designed car models to mod the Grand Theft Auto series of PC games. In the same space there was a community of around 50-100 other blogs showcasing their own works. Even in this very specific niche community there was a clear stratification of blog traffic. Since page counters were popular at the time, one could see that some popular blogs receiving upwards of 400000 total hits whereas many newcomers would be around 5000 total hits.
At the time I wondered what allowed some blogs to grow so big relative to others. Was it the content? Surely this has a great deal of impact, but it wasn’t the whole story. After learning about Chapter 14 in Networks I realized the linking between blogs is what makes some much bigger than others.
One feature prevalent throughout all sorts of blogging communities is the blogroll. The blogroll is a feature, usually a sidebar that you maintain on your blog that displays a list of links to other blogs of your choosing, usually with a snippet of their latest post. As the ThoughtCo article explains, it is an unspoken etiquette rule to link back to blogs that link to you. While I maintained I a blogroll on my blog, I had mainly compiled a list of other blogs whose authors I was friends with, or that linked to me, and I deemed cool enough to reciprocate. However, through Networks, it becomes clear that if I was solely focused on maximizing my blog traffic and search engine ranking, I should have followed a different approach.
The unspoken purpose of the blogroll is not necessarily to list out all of your friend blogs, but more to use as a tool to get reciprocated backlinks to your blog. The more high-traffic blogs you have on your blogroll, the higher your hub score will be. The authors of some of these blogs may feel obligated to reciprocate and link back to your blog. The more pages that link to your blog, the higher your blog’s authority score will be. Together these two parameters factor into how search engines rank your blog. Going back to my specific community niche, uploading gameplay content to YouTube and download files on popular mod hosting sites provides additional high traffic avenues from which you can link back to your site.
Now when I look back at the most prominent pages in the community, I notice the following similarities:
• Been around for several years (more time to form blogroll connections)
• Very expansive blogrolls
• Downloadable content on blog (serves as an attraction)
• Backlinks from YouTube and other hosting sites (serves as independent traffic avenue)
Now if I were to start a new blog from scratch, I would adopt the following plan to maximize traffic:
Create an expansive blogroll that points to all the most prominent blogs, then reach out to the authors of each to see if they will reciprocate. Then create as much additional content as possible that is externally hosted and backlinks to the page. The initial blog roll will maximize the new blogs hub score. All of the new back links will serve to maximize the blog’s authority score. Both of these on their own will help to draw traffic to the blog, but combined they will boost the blog’s search engine ranking, which will further increase traffic.
Source: https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-blogroll-3476580