Who Should You Link To?

Someone on one of Deb’s posts here asked, “I am working on identifying the important blogs in my various niches – how about a post on how exactly to do that? It’s easy if your niche is tech or web related. You can just look at Technorati’s Top 100. But what’s an efficient way to go about finding other niches? How do you know who’s big? AND how many of these communities is it reasonable to strive to be active in?”

Now, since it was Deb’s post I’m not going to answer the whole question – maybe she’d like to. But I wanted to comment on this, because I’ve always found the whole “who to link to” issue really interesting. I’ve seen people ask this question before on forums, and it’s fascinating to me, because I’m sort of the old school mentality of linking to who I like vs. linking strategically.

Not having performed any serious scientific studies on linking, I can only offer my opinion though. Maybe it would be more beneficial for me to only link to big names, maybe not. I know it’s sometimes beneficial when big names link to me, but the other way around, well, I’m not so sure.

Examples:

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