Gaming the Blog System

My colleague sent me this article a few days ago that tells me that sometimes ones concern with page rank can go too far. Gordon knows far more than me about Google page rank, but I do recall that links to your blog help move you up in the blog food chain. So, how do you get more websites to link to you? One way is to go to other websites that allow comments and post a comment with a link to your website posting! Ingenious. So, I write a post on hot topic of the day, then I go to the blogs I know that allow comments, and I link to myself. I guess if I'm really pragmatic, I don't even care if the post to which I am commenting has anything to do with my original post.

Anyway, Google is on to this and is now creating ways to make sure that links found in comments do not count toward page rank. I suppose that some blogs sell advertising, so they may want to go up in the "rankings," but if you are blogging for free, you have to be pretty freaky to do this. I thought USNWR rankings led to strange behavior.