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Showing posts with the label backlink

Thoughts on cross-linking, back-linking

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In the early days of the world wide web, most links to external sites were, in my opinion, "legitimate" rather than contrived. My first site dated back to 1994, and consisted of a landing page along with some samples of my academic writing. Back then, besides having no Wikipedia (but a plethora of Usenet newsgroups to refer to), I was able to mainly browse and select what I considered to be quality sites to which to link, and I gave no thought to soliciting inbound links from those destinations. Something that I recall about Japanese sites before the turn of the millennium, is that the cultural concept of " giri " was being commonly applied to making links mutual, and more interestingly, that authors of content gave explicit permission to have their content linked to by strangers, with the proper etiquette that when one created an external link, the owner(s) of the destination page would be notified. Now, most SEO blogs and resources speak of the painstaking ro