Link trains are the ones where a bunch of blogs will be linked from a blog and a person seeing it will link to all the other blogs including your’s in the list. So when this goes on, you get many blogs linking to you and hence provide nice stats for your blog. These link trains are started in more number in the recent days since the PR update is expected very soon. Though this provide your blog good stats, they have disadvantages too. First we’ll see the advantages.
Advantages:
- You get many blogs linked to you and hence your Technorati and Page Rank improve
- You get traffic when a big blog joins the train and list your blog
- With increase in traffic, you get an increase in your Alexa rank(Obviously not a huge increase)
- New people find your blog and chances are they might subscribe to your blog
Disadvantages:
- Consider your daily readers. They might get irritated when you jump into every link train
- You don’t provide any value to your readers with the post
- Gives your blog an unprofessional look sometimes(I know many won’t agree)
- Decrease in subscribers’ count
You can join the link trains but do it very rarely. Don’t jump into all the link trains. And if you really want to jump into more than one link train, then write a good post and at the end post about the train and the links. This might reduce few of the disadvantages mentioned above.
Do you jump into all the link trains? Do you agree with the disadvantages mentioned above?
Agreed on this post. I have stopped boarding the trains.
Nirmal, I haven’t boarded any train till date. I hope I won’t in future also, like you.
Nice points. the SHOULD are must and for the SHOULD NOT, there is an easy way to solve it i.e. make Asides post stuff in your blog and categorize those posts in Asides, in that way the posts will not appear full in the homepage, just a small description of it!
Rishi, good idea. Also as I said you can write a good post and at the end you can enter these stuffs.
very good points.. I did two so far and saw the technorati numbers go up within few days but I had no quality comments other than people coming back to ask if their link can be updated!! I like the idea of keeping them separate from other quality posts though!
Pearl, Link trains can increase our Technorati ranks very well but we have to care for our readers and don’t jump into every train.
Good post. I’ve also stopped boarding in link trains.
I think Google now detects potential link trains.
Shankar, good point there. We should be careful with these because Google always has its eyes on us.
Link trains are the easiest for Google to detect amongst all the different traffic and PR boosting techniques. I have always been against it.
Anand, Yes Google can surely detect it. Thanks for your comment.
Ram…
That was a nice topic to blog about..
Cheers!
Mani
Mani,
Yeah!! I saw few blogs with two posts just about the link train(Though I don’t remember them). So I thought of blogging about it with advantages and disadvantages. Thanks for your comment.
I think these are good for new blogs as they get a lot of exposure .
Madhur, It can be done when there is not many readers. But a new blog should try to improve content so that it can do well in the blogosphere.
Nice points! Everyone should think ahead before participating in Link Trains which are meant just to improve the PR.
Ben, Link Trains will bother your readers less if you do it on Sundays. On Sundays, not many people write articles. So if you decide to join a link train, then do it on Sunday.
I would never board a link train in my life. As you said, it diminishes the value of the blog and reduces the reputation, makes the blog look sort of desperate! Good post
Vijay, Rightly said. It reduces the reputation. Just what I wanted to express in this post.
Very good points – too many trains can lead to less readers, which is the last thing any blogger wants
Plus, TOO too many trains can lead to Google getting wise – also bad!
Allsux, I can’t say more than you. You said everything. We need Readers and we need Google. But both don’t like link trains.