Importance of Domain Name, Links, Incoming Links, Dead Links
If you have been following me here, you probably have read what I wrote about making a choice between a domain name or free subdomain name. You will probably wonder why I keep on writing about having your own domain name instead of a free subdomain name.
First of all, I would like to clarify that I have nothing against subdomain name, it is free and low maintenance. What I mean with low maintenance is because you do not spend money for a subdomain name, only your time, effort, and energy in writing content and promoting your blog.
In most of my websites and blogs, my readers and friends especially blogger friends have been probably wondering why I rarely link and promote other blogs, especially those with free subdomain names, on my personal blogs. I have a lot of sites before I started blogging and I know the experience of having a lot of links.
My experience in linking sites and blogs was eating so much of my time then as I had to regularly check the links if they were still active or not. I was avoiding the scenario that once a site was discontinued by the owner, which by the way goes for both the domain name and the free subdomain name, you ended up being linked to a dead link. In some instances, your website might even be linked to a pornography site without you knowing it. Have you been redirected to a pornography site?
In the case of a free subdomain name, most often when the bloggers realize that it is time to move on to having their own domain names, they normally abandon their old blogs with the free subdomain name and just update the new blogs. If the abandoned blogs are still going to exist, there is no problem. But once they abandoned and eventually deleted the old blogs, then your site will be linked to dead links. This also applies to domain names but often it is happening to blogs having free subdomain names.
Another problem is when the old blog was abandoned and someone registered for that subdomain name when it became available again, then your blog is linked to the blog of someone you do not even know. What if the content of the blog is in conflict with your beliefs and principles?
What is the problem now? The problem is, when you have been linking a lot of blogs from the blog entries of your own blog, it would be taxing on your part to go back to all your posts and delete or update all those links from each post. What if you have more than 1,000 blog entries already and you actually have linked several blogs which are no longer existing?
It should not actually be a problem on your part but it is going to be definitely frustrating on the part of your readers when they clicked on the links and they were redirected to dead links, abandoned blogs or worse to porno sites. With that, if you have a blog with a free subdomain name, please do not delete it, just put a link on your blog that you have moved to a new domain name.
What I have mentioned were actually the reasons that are keeping me to link to free subdomain names from a blog entry. But I have done linking blogs from my blog several times too anyway. With regard to linking blogs from the links page, I have no problem with it.
Linking to other blogs is definitely a good way of exchanging links as it will help your blog in terms of ranking at the search engines. I know the importance of having links especially the incoming links. In that sense, you get incoming links because you were also linking those blogs who are linking to your blog.
But let me emphasize here though, that what I wrote should not hinder you if you would like to do this linking practice. I will also definitely be practicing it as well. We just have to take the risk if ever what I have written happens.
Disclosure:
If you register your domain name at GoDaddy using my referral link, I will earn from it.
