Dallas Internet Marketing

17 Motivations for Linking

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This is the second in a series of posts called Finding the Linkerati.

The other posts in the series are:

• Overview of Finding the Linkerati
• Motivations for Linking (this post)
• Lateral Thinking.
• Search operators to find Linkerati.
• How to use directories like DMOZ, & Yahoo Directory to build links (and no I don’t mean being listed in them).
• How to use Social Media sites like Delicious and Digg to find the linkers.
• Studying the masters to find linking opportunities.

Why do some websites link to other websites? As people are predominately self-interested, what would make someone take the time to link and acknowledge someone else? Understanding these motivations can help link builders develop high quality, naturally given links which can both help rankings, drive interested traffic, establish authority and create business.

Old School Reasons for Citations

Scholars in the field of bibliometric literature have been studying changes and trends in the output of scholarly publications and literature for years. One of the areas they have tracked are reasons for citations in scholarly works. Now, given ink citations on paper pages in scholarly books in a library somewhere, may seem eons away from pixels and blogs, but what about the motivations behind the citations?

Several studies conducted found the following motivations behind the giving of citations in academic books:

• Paying homage
• Identifying methodology
• Providing background
• Correcting
• Criticizing
• Authenticating claims
• Alerting to works soon to be published
• Spreading the word on poorly disseminated work
• Identifying original concepts
• Promoting one’s own authority

Internet Citations

At the turn of the century, scholars turned some of their focus to studying why hyperlinks were given on the internet. In addition to the previously mentioned motivations, the scholars noted that the following were motivations in hyper linking between websites

• Providing and immediate access mechanism to the subject in question
• Providing a graphical image
• Acknowledging sponsors
• Linking to business partners
• Linking to products or services purchased
• Linking to clients

I think one other motivations to add to the list are is as follows:

• Status symbols- People are always looking for something or someone to validate who they are or what they do, and in turn want to use these status symbols to communicate their value to others. That is why badges like “Top 50 fill in the blank website”, Better Business Bureau Online Member, &  TripAdvisor’s Visitor’s Choice awards are highly linked items. Winners (the linkerati) can use them to validate their website/company/service etc to their own community.

So when you are looking for the linkerati for your product or service think about what types of websites you can be the fulfillment of some of the above motivations and you are sure to find the pockets of linkerati in your niche.