Sam Freedom's blog is one of the Big Dogs on EntreCard. I am not sure how you become one of the Big Dogs, but there are a handful of blogs that show up in the Most Popular and Most Recommended sections everyday. Sam is usually at the top of these EntreCard lists. His blog can be interesting and he has a way of talking that gets people's attention. Sam recently wrote a post about Entrecard Link Love. He's for it, so long as you do it his way.
Ok, a small digression. What is link love? Old style link love is simply a blogger putting a link to another blog that they like in their blog. This can be done with Blogrolls, links in posts, or widgets of one sort or another. The newer meaning of Link Love is I link to you, so you need to link to me. This is a way to increase your Technorati Authority, your Google Pagerank, and your Alexa ranking. Only, it doesn't help to get links from 'bad neighborhoods.'
For example, Sam Freedom's Internet Marketing Controversy Blog, is not getting much juice for a link from If You Write It, as my blog has a Pagerank of 3, an Alexa rank of over 300,000, and a Technorati Authority of only 44. But I am not hurting him much either. Sam is not that far out ahead of me that I could drag him down. I'm sure Sam would say he is miles ahead of me, if not light lights. I just don't have the kind of focus that Sam has.
Links from blogs that were started last night will not help an established blog's stats. Link Farms are sites, often automated, setup with the sole purpose of creating fake links. Google doesn't like fake links. Which begs the question, what is a fake link? A fake link is one that was made solely to improve your Pagerank, Authority, or Ranking. Real links are made by real people that like what you have to say.
Sam and a number of other EntreCard users are unhappy about being linked to by blogs they don't like. A few months ago Dosh Dosh came up with the Technorati Favorited Exchange, this was a way to get into the Top 100 Favorites on Technorati and swap links at the same time. I wasn't paying attention at the time and missed that boat.
A couple of EntreCard users have came up with the brilliant plan of copying and pasting the EntreCard User Mosaic from the Entrecard blog. In theory this would give everyone using EntreCard a quick jump up the Technorati ranks by creating 1300 links pointing at each other's blogs.
Bloggers are mostly Lone Wolf types and we don't like the idea of sharing-well, anything. But I do find it odd that the complaints I am seeing are about being linked to without asking permission first. When was the last time you asked someone if you could link to them? You might have asked for a link back-and likely not gotten one. Some bloggers view their links as a sacred trust that can only be bestowed on those found to be worthy. I pretty much link to anyone who has content relevant to whatever I am talking about.
Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Squidoo, Delicious, and all the other link warehouses don't count as link farms, since the links pointing out of them are ignored by Google. Random blogs suddenly pointing a thousand links out might be a blip on Google's radar, or it might not.
The question is how much does you Rank, of one sort or another, matter to you?
