Bill Paxton as Simon, the Used Car Salesman in True Lies
I don’t know what motivates people, but it sure isn’t integrity some days.
When I’m doing my freelance writing for other sites, we link to our sources. That includes the actual article of the sources. In that way, we pay homage to the source and the actual article.
Now a days I’m encountering more shady link deals than I used to.
Just now, I was following up a source and the link to the source only pointed to the main page of the source, not the actual article on the Chicago Tribune. What’s that about? When I see that, I skip the first site completely to credit the actual source when possible.
Another site that many moons ago I used to check on a lot, whom I will refer to as ASB… I stopped using because 99% of all links on the site aren’t source links, but links to themselves and they NEVER point to their source. (Maybe never is a strong word… they may have an article source here and there by accident.)
Practices like this are just plain old disappointing.
It generates a need to dig for the true source article and not source link to the first site that I found it on… if you wanna thin out the credit, fine… if you want to self-link, fine. It’s just motivation for me to work at it harder to find a valid source.
ProBlogger speculated on this very issue a few weeks prior to this article and cited a few possibly reasons for this behavior:
Competition, Page Rank Sculpting, Laziness, Ignorance or just the trend of the times.
Personally, if you have great material and provide a resource that many find useful, competition and page rank actually take care of themselves. (Well, that and a little proper social media use!)
A trend of the times… sure. Sounds like a great excuse. Maybe it’s more realistic to accept the fact that society has developed into what used to be characterized as shady behavior or practices. The classic “Used Car Salesman” is no longer a metaphor that stands out because it’s what we do. (Does my lead-in photo now make sense?)
I have to tell you though, I had a prolific site that really took off on me and I didn’t have a lot of inbound links… they were all outbound links. And some arguments say that outbound links can also help.
The bottom line may very well be this quote from Google:
“I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.”
Matt Cutts, Google. Quote from ProBlogger website.
And yes, I link out to the relevant sources because it’s the right thing to do. The courteous thing to do and I can sleep at night know that.
But that’s just me.
Source: ProBlogger
