How to lose 5,000 inlinks per month and alienate bloggers

If you have been blogging a few years, you may have noticed a change in the way other bloggers react to your content. Back then when I started, in 2004 and 2005, all you had to do is write a witty comment to some news story and five other bloggers would link to your post, possibly adding a few views of their own. Nowadays, you can spend weeks on research for a specific blog post and “all you get back” are a number of retweets, and maybe maybe one or two blog links. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, especially for me who have an old blog with thousands of old links to it, I already have a high page rank. And it’s great that Twitter and Facebook have made it increadibly easy for your thoughts to travel across the web. But it was easier back then to get link love and, since a link is a “vote” on your content in Google, thereby building a good page rank for your blog.

So I will try to more often reward really good blog posts with a link back from my blog, not “only a retweet”.

“Good content deserves more than a retweet.”

Here is a good example that ties in well with the link love theme of this post. Simon Sundén, a great Swedish SEO expert, wrote a story the other day about how one Norwegian daily voluntarily turned down 5,000 natural inlinks per month. In short, Dagbladet.no used to use Twingly to show which blog posts link back to a given article. Since this concept is a win-win for both the paper and the blogger, many Scandinavian news sites have introduced Twingly. The news site gets lots of links and some traffic, while the blogger gets traffic back and some recognition.

What Sundén noticed was that Dagbladet.no stopped using Twingly some time late in 2009 and as you can see from the red columns in the graph below, the effect was that the number of inlinks per month dropped drastically from 5,000-6,000 to a measly 1,000. Meanwhile, competing daily VG.no kept Twingly and has enjoyed a steady level of links from bloggers (see blue columns below).

In the long run, VG.no will probably become a stronger site from a search perspective, compared to Dagbladet.no because bloggers are more likely to link to a similar article on VG.no than on Dagbladet.no.

twingly-inlinks-vg-vs-dagbl

Image credit: Simon Sundén.

DagensPS introduces Twingly – we saw it coming

Swedish news site DagensPS.se has redesigned and introduces social bookmarks and blog links via Twingly. Sound familiar? Thats’ because we told you so, already back in March.

Today Dagens Media writes that the new site is launched, with social bookmarks and Twingly links. We also wrote that DagensPS were testing to let readers start their own blogs, but that feature has not become a reality yet.

Our screen dumps also showed that DagensPS planned to launch a media monitoring feature called PS Spy. That has now gone live and DagensPS’ CEO Bengt Uggla promises it will challenge professional monitoring services “that cost from 15,000 kronor per year”. PS Spy has taken a year to develop and significant investments. Uggla hopes to attract hundreds of thousands of users. The beta version that went live today searches online news sites and blogs in Sweden and the rest of the world. But it only seems to be searching sources during the last 7 days and the number of blogs it searches cannot be very large either. A simple search for “Lindex” only gives us 11 hits from as few as two blogs, Engla’s Showroom and Modefeber, incorrectly named Macfeber. Twingly’s own blog search engine finds 11 hits among Swedish blogs during the last 4 and a half hours alone. And that is a free service. On top of that, with Twingly and other free services like for example Knuff.se, you can subscribe to search results by RSS but I cannot find this feature to be available on PS Spy. We would also have liked the social bookmarking tools to be included in PS Spy, but they are not.

Media Culpa’s verdict: back to the lab again.

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DagensPS to add Twingly and host blogs in redesign

Media Culpa can reveal that the Swedish business online publication DagensPS is planning to introduce blog links via Twingly and social bookmarking features in a new redesign. That’s the conclusion after we got access to two versions of the site at dagensps.se. The new site design, which was labelled “DEMO” just a few days ago, is not yet launched. It has a much simpler feel to it with less (and fewer) colours and lighter fonts. For example are serifs introduced for the largest headlines instead of sans-serifs.

The current design below:

dagensps_old

The demo design below includes such features as “sharing”, i.e. you can save and share articles via the social bookmarking sites Digg, reddit, StumbleUpon, Pusha, del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia and of course via Facebook.

dagensps_new

The new site will also link to blog posts via the Twingly service (DagensPS is not listed yet as a partner of Twingly).

dagesps_twingly

Under “Services” the site is set to include for example a blog hosting service (“create a blog”).

dagensps_blogg

The redesign does not seem to be ready for launch just yet since articles with the old fonts appear further down on the pages. But by the look of it the site will make better use of social media tools and have a more appealing design. Definitely a step into web 2.0.

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IDG tracks blog comments with Twingly

The IT publishing house IDG has started to publish links to blogs that comment on their online articles. IDG is using the Twingly service that the two dailies Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet have been using for a couple of months.

– It is important for us to become more active in the blogosphere, which is an important part of the new media landscape, says Lisa Bjerre who is responsible for the initiative at IDG.

Update: Webbsnack notices that there is a new feature where it shows the RSS feed of the blog if you drag the mouse over the link. Pretty neat. See more here.

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