Top Blogs Share Links With Readers

Posted on July 22, 2006

The LexBlog Blog follows responds to a Jeff Jarvis complaint about how portals try to keep people on the portal site with a great post about how the best blogs intentionally send people away to other resources.

Lots of links that open new windows is obviously a bad idea. Remember that blogs are also popular for what they don't have so you will want to keep your site fast loading and free of irritants that might repel readers.

You should also share links in the standard way so that when people click the link they are taking directly to the site and can get back using the back button on their browser. Don't have outbound links opening up new windows on your reader's computers as LexBlog suggests:

Want to tick people off? Have your links open new windows. Have users click to a number of links on your blog so they now have 8 or 9 windows open. Make it difficult to browse because the back button can't be used to browse because every link is a new window. You’ll have people unsubscribing from your blog in a New York minute.

We've also said before that linking out is a good strategy so we concur with the LexBlog's post.