Links, courtesy and practicality

Why do we add links to our posts? The conventional thinking says it helps you to build traffic. And that may be true though, with the proliferation of sites, most of which have been designed with SEO (search engine optimization) in mind, perhaps now not so much. Still …

I think I add links mainly because it seems discourteous not too. A large number of my posts are based on what I’ve found on other sites (and I suspect this is true for most people who blog). So it strikes me that the courteous thing to do is acknowledge that that is where the idea originates, the idea isn’t something that pop into my head from nowhere.

If I were to go over my archived posts I would likely find a large number of them were sparked by posts I’ve come across on Seth Godin’s blog. For me, he’s a motherload of ideas and generally compelling musings. Recently, I’ve also been finding the same on Nick Carr’s blog, Rough Type. So I often link to them.

Of course, if you have readers, it’s also courteous to them to link to the various pages you refer to, whether it’s a blog posting, an article, or a site. It’s nice to blather about something but, if it’s at all interesting, your reader shouldn’t have to search the web to find the thing you’re referring to.

There’s a problem, however. Frankly, it’s often a pain in the backside to add the links. It’s not that it’s particularly difficult to do, but retracing your steps to find where pages you refer to are located, can be. The way the mind works, you find an interesting post, you begin writing about the idea at the heart of it. As you do, a related idea/post is triggered and you refer to it. But it’s something you came across a day or two ago, or even a week or more ago … “Where in the world was that?”

The point here is that while I think linking is courteous, and perhaps practical in a traffic building sense, it isn’t always the best way to spend your time. With this in mind, I’ve recently stepped away from the obsessive linking that I use to do because it can take up more time than I can afford to spend. And really, the point is what you are writing, not all the links.

So … to link or not to link? Traffic building aside, I think you need to find a balance between the courteous thing and the practical. With that in mind, I’ll link to the primary one or two blogs/sites that seed the primary ideas behind a post (dispelling any notion that they originate with me), but I won’t pepper a post with every related link.

It’s beneficial from the time point of view but also from the clutter point of view. Too many links, and they all get obscured.