Bachelor 2016: Posting links in the comments section of other blogs

Hey, Bachelor Nation.

I got a comment last night that I was “hijacking” Lincee’s blog because I post links to my recaps in her comments section. Hijacking is a bit of an overstatement considering that Lincee gets hundreds of comments on her blogs each week and I’m just another one of them. But I wanted to clear this issue up for anyone who thinks me posting links to my recaps in the comments section of other blogs is shady.

I am not friends with Lincee but I have communicated with her several times over the internet and we are cool. If she thought I was “hijacking” her blog, she could easily delete my comments with the links to my blog and yet she doesn’t and the reason she doesn’t is 1) I’m not causing her any harm by leaving thoughtful comments on her blog with a link to mine and 2) what I’m doing is actually to her benefit as well as my own.

A lot of you are here because you followed a link from the comments section of popular Bachelor blogs like I Hate Green Beans, Bachelor Burn Book, Reality Steve, Office Stace, and Sharleen Joynt’s blog on Flare. If you notice at the end of each of my blogs, I link to them directly so I’m actually giving them more direct exposure than they’re giving me by letting me post a link to my articles in their comments section. This is fine since they’re the big fish and I’m still trying to build an audience. It takes a lot of work to write my blogs and creating consistent readership is even more challenging. If you ever start a blog or a website, you’ll discover that the actual work is in getting traffic.

I get a significant amount of traffic from other Bachelor blogs and I send traffic back. This is called a link exchange – they just don’t link to me directly like I do to them. But every blog I post a link on, I send traffic back to them. I can see this on the back end of my site. I can tell where people are coming from and where they go so I’m increasing readership for other blogs while I’m increasing my own (don’t worry, I can’t see who you are. Just how many people come to my blog from other sites and how many visit other sites after visiting mine).

I’m acting as a sort of hub between the major Bachelor blogs. Someone who primarily reads Reality Steve may never have heard of Lincee and I Hate Green Beans. But if they follow the link from Steve’s blog to mine, they’ll be able to follow along to Lincee’s blog or any of the other blogs I link to at the end of each of my articles.

This is not a new marketing strategy. This is primarily how Search Engine Optimization works to get sites listed higher in search engines results. However, I am far more ethical in what I do than most SEO companies who send people out to post random links on random blogs to drive traffic to a particular site without thought to reciprocity.

I am not a spambot. I read all of the blogs I post links on and I leave thoughtful comments along with a link to my posts. Most SEO commenters don’t read the content of other blogs, don’t leave thoughtful comments, and simply link to their sites in order to increase their search engine rankings and site traffic. If you have a problem with what I’m doing, then you have a problem with the internet because this is how it works. Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide if you want to read my blog and if you don’t like my comments on other blogs, then don’t read mine. It’s that simple.

Thanks for understanding. 🙂

Sincerely,
Emily Condit

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