A Links Course

I’m frustrated. My Technorati “authority” has dropped in recent weeks. This, in spite of regularly posting some reasonably readable content, and recently receiving link love from some high profile A-listers.

In a fit of paranoia, I imagine the authority’s algorithm keepers continue to hold a grudge against me for a previous post suggesting the site’s in its twilight. Who knows.

My authority number has gone from about 125 to 108, which translates from a 50,000 to 75,000 rank among all bloggers. (I rationalize my place at the end of the long tail by telling friends that even at 75,000, The Flack remains in the top .016 percent of all bloggers.) So why does my Feedburner chicklet register a record 600+/- daily visitors?

As my eminently Clickable friend Max Kalehoff points out in his post today: it’s not enough to post compelling content. You need to get people to link to it. Actually, this wasn’t the primary point of Max’s post. Instead, he laid down the gauntlet by demanding that journalists of any stripe include a hyper-link to the information sources cited in their stories. As Max more deftly puts it:

“We [the PR pro] invest a lot of time nurturing relationships with reporters, including supplying interviews, insights, opinions and, sometimes, material company assets. If a journalist uses such material directly or indirectly from a company, it’s common practice (and courtesy) to credit the source of that information. In pre-Internet days, sourcing the company name alone was considered fair attribution. However, a decade into the commercial Web, it’s far from it!”

He then goes on to provide a decent rationale for a journalist to link back.

However, there’s one potential (non) sticking point that may put the kabosh on this Utopian PR request: by including lonks to other sites, the journalist could in effect take the reader away from his/her site, which doesn’t help much on the stickiness scale.

Max is nonetheless right when he suggests we make every effort to convince the journalist to give us back something more valuable in return for our efforts. Times have changed and link relevancy is the new currency.

“Looking after the link should be just as much a part of the interview process as preparing, conducting the interview, following up and ensuring name attribution.”

Now, PLEASE link to this blog…