Recruiting.com

Five Things You Should Read

Five You Should Read

We're not the only ones struggling with the questions of links, traffic and influence.

Seth Goldstein, without providing links, maintains that A-list bloggers don't link, preferring to hold their audiences rather than sending it out to other bloggers.

We're not A-listers, but we do have a hierarchy based on links and traffic in our little corner of the blogosphere.

Part of the problem is time.  No one has enough, and maybe top bloggers figure that everyone is reading the same stuff on RSS, so what's the point?

LinkSwap seems to pretty clearly go against the spirit of Google's rules, and despite successful campaigns in other blog communities, it needs to be abandoned in its present form (I have some other ideas for those still interested), but I think there clearly exists a need for Linking policies, Linking Etiquette, and Linking Awareness posts.

This whole campaign is not intended to point fingers or demand standards - after all, each person's weblog is their own business, as is their choice on how to link.  At the same time, like any community, we shold be involved in setting our own standards and educating newcomers on blogging etiquette.  We can disagree on choices, or complain about the lack of individual autonomy when groups of bloggers band together, but not doing anything is also a choice.  It's a choice to reward early adopters, without regard to the quality of their content. 

I'll have more for those who e-mailed me and put future updates at Stlrecruiting.com.

-Jim Durbin

A great conversation is swirling arount the LinkSwap idea, and I wanted to address a few issues on why the LinkSwap is not only a good idea, but the best way to ensure that quality content is recognized in the recruiting blogosphere and beyond.

1) Blogger links are currency online.  The more incoming links, and the more influential those links, the higher a blog will show in the search engines. 

2) The blogosphere is an example of a scale-free network, which means it is subject to certain laws pertaining to growth, and link popularity.  These laws, if applied correctly, are not theories of what should be done, but descriptive of what actually happens when bloggers start linking each other.  The best description I've seen of this is here, with the full Clay Shirky, TTLB, Albert Barabasi, Pareto Principle discussion fleshed out.

3) A term called preferential attachment is the culprit.  As new nodes (bloggers) enter a space, the natural tendency of each is to look through links of other blogs to select who they will link to.  The more links you have, the more links you get.  Thus the natural result of a free system is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

4) Note that the intention of each blogger is to link to interesting and compelling content.  Individually, we are filtering quality bloggers. 

5) As a group, we are rewarding popular bloggers, making them more popular, not by virtue of their content, but by virtue of their longevity.

So if we decide to say that every blogger should only link to blogs they like, the result is blogs that already have attention will get more attention, not because they are any better, but because they have been around longer.  That is why I called Heather's system of linking "flawed." 

In a very ironic way, "gaming" the system is one of the best ways to ensure that quality is the deciding factor in who gets links, and who does not.  The LinkSwap does its best to equalize the recruiting blogosphere, proving a top-down approach that creates a level-playing field.

The more participants we have, the more "fair" it becomes.  In our daily postings, we go back to linking only those with something important to say.  But every once a while, fairness needs a push.

And now I defend Heather's side of the argument below.    

There's a good discussion going on about the LinkSwap.

We'd like your opinions, but we also need your e-mails and your posts linking the original post. I'll be calling a lot of you old-timers to get you on the bandwagon. 

Help us promote recruiting blogging to the internet public.  By helping each other, you're helping yourselves.

Send your url's to jim@recruiting.com.

Are you a struggling blogger, maybe new to the game, full of vim and vigor, but lacking in links, traffic, and Google influence?

Are you an experienced recruiter blogger who never quite got that linkfest where everyone adds you to their sidebar because you're such a swell writer?

Do you want to promote the recruiting blogosphere so your name and your message and your brand get more attention from the search engines?

Recruiting.com has the solution.  We're going to participate in a good old-fashioned LinkSwap, where old and new alike get the opportunity to improve their technorati ranking (And improving that technorati rating is a good SEO strategy.)

Here's how it works. 
1) You send in your blog url's, as many as you want.
2) I'll organize the url's into a list of participating bloggers.
3) When the time comes, we all use the blogrolling service to add the list of names to each of our individual sites.
4) Everyone who gives links gets links.

Blogrolling is a great software, which means you won't have 50 links to mess up our pretty little web page (unless you want to), and you're still free to list your "favored" links, but by participating, we can boost the relevance and the ranking of everyone writing in the Recruiting Blogosphere, which can only be good for us.

This is a time-honored blogging event, but it is only open to people who recruit, sell software to recruits, or have more than a casual relationship to the Recruiting Blogosphere.  Send your site names and url's to jim@recruiting.com, and you'll get further instructions as we get enough numbers to make this worthwhile.

This is a one-time offer - as the benefit only accrues for a blogger once.  Leave comments below if you're interested in finding out why this is a good idea.