Interview with Denis Bernardy - Question 5 by Free Blogging Advice Guidelines project

Interview with Denis Bernardy
Question 5
(read Question 4 here)

Are there any strategies that can help to cross link different blogs
(not some automatic junk)?

This kind of thing is usually dealt best with this so-called automatic junk tools which are not necessarily junk. Automated linking would assume several things: detecting what the keywords are. This is something that can be reasonable easy to do nowadays because of the web services that are put in place by the search engines.

But you still have to insert an actual link. So the question goes down to - Are we saying where the links show up? We do have a tool which is called Smart Link. It is some thing that I have been initially doing. I needed a tool that would be a little like Auto Links - say you have a post, and there are keywords in it. You want let's say Dog Training to be linked to your dog training page. And want this to happen any time you reference Dog Training.

On second thought maybe you don't want this to happen every time. Say if you mentioned Dog Training three times in a text, then it makes sense to link to if the first time because it's the first mentioning, and it makes sense from usability perspective. But every single mentioning of Dog Training article gets a link to this very same location - then it becomes clumsy.

Smart Link allows you to pre-insert links. So there is a special syntax which is basically you have open brackets - get your text the link if necessary (you can remove it, it uses the link text) and close the brackets. What happens then is that it decided whether to insert the link or not based on whether you have the content on your web site. It would silence the links until you create a page that has Dog Training.

If you insert a link to a bookmark, it will link to the bookmark instead of the page until you create a page. When you are on a page it uses the same syntax - the bookmark is already on the page.

Basically you end up managing special links to other sites using the link manager in WordPress. You just create as many links as necessary. You use the Smart Link syntax to pre-insert these links. So that actually you don't need to insert them into your content manually. That is as closest as we can get from cross linking of several blogs. We can do that, but this is, probably, not what a user has in mention.

I would assume what she had in meaning like tool which would automatically extract the meaning of text and based on centralized depository will link to other sites. There is obviously room in a market for a tool like that. This is not something that I or any other else - as far as I know - has ever done.

Read Question 6 about Future Posts and TimeStamp Problem in more details.