Linking back to NEPA Blogs

NEPA Blogs is a network of blogs by people from or living in Northeastern Pennsylvania or who blog about Northeastern Pennsylvania. Our goal is to link to all of the blogs that fall into those categories, and to increase the "linkiness" of all the linked blogs, making it more likely that people will find your blog through a link or a search engine search.

Originally NEPA Blogs was going to be a one-to-one network (or, really, all-to-all), where every member would link to every other member. This would increase everybody's linkiness tremendously, but would also require lots of effort to add new members, or remove dead links. So the decision was made to make it a hub-and-spokes network, where there would be a central site - NEPA Blogs - that points to everyone else's site, and everyone in the network would point back to the central site. In this way the central site would have a high degree of linkiness - lots of links coming in, lots of links going out, and everyone else would have the benefit of being linked by a strong central site, and being just two clicks away from everyone else. (And, of course, everyone could still link to everyone else if they wanted to!)

The thing is, this plan only really works if everyone who is being linked by the central site also links back to the central site. Otherwise the central site has a lot of links pointing out, but only a few pointing in, and the benefit of being linked by the central site is diminished.

Is your site linked from NEPA Blogs? If so, does your site link back to NEPA Blogs? If not, there are some simple ways to fix that.

One way is to just add a link to your main page. The link could go to http://nepablogs.blogspot.com, or even http://nepablogs.org (which would be especially useful when and if we ever migrate to another platform.) Test the link, make sure it goes where it's supposed to go - the main page, that is - and you're done!

Another way is to add one of our lovely lovely buttons to your site - or even make one of your own! As of this writing we have nine styles on our sidebar to choose from, four by me, four by professional designer Leslie Stewart of Darling Stewie! Just be sure to add the code that will link the button back to either http://nepablogs.blogspot.com, or http://nepablogs.org. If you need instructions, Michelle has also written those out in tremendous detail.

So that's it! By linking back to the NEPA Blogs site, you help to strengthen the linkiness of the entire NEPA Blogs network. And that benefits all of us!