FHK Blogroll (Updated Frequently)

UPDATED 08/25/09: In order to continue to promote the blogs we like, we have moved our blogroll to a blog post. Now, in the sidebar you’ll see a link to the Blog Roll, which contains links to some great conservative blogs. This date of this blog post will be updated at least every six months, so that we can promote other conservative bloggers by driving traffic to their sites, AND by giving them links which will count toward their Technorati count (also see here)…without the need for our previous two-foot long list of mostly unreciprocated links in our sidebar. Questions, comments and suggestions are all welcome. If you want to be added to this list or if your link on this list needs to be updated, please e-mail Jenn, here.

For more information, see: Why Blogrolling is Useless.

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• 1389 Blog
• America Needs Me
• All American Blogger
• America, You Asked For It!
• ARRA
• AWOL Civilization
• Batesline
• Benjamin Hodge FB
• Beyond the Cusp
• Big Dog’s Weblog
• Blog Catalog
• Blog of Walker
• Blue Collar Muse
• Boston Maggie
• Caffeinated Thoughts
• Cao2’s Weblog
• Capitalist Observer
• Chaotic Synaptic Activity
• Christians Against Leftist Heresy
• Colonel Robert Neville
• Common Cents
• Cornswalled
• Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State
• Crystal Clear Conservative
• Defending Crusader
• Diminished Expectations
• D=S
• Do the Right Thing CyberCrew
• Dustbury
• E!! The True Conservative Story™
• Eric Odom
• Faultline USA
• Fausta’s Blog
• Ft. Hard Knox
• Fousesquawk
• Free Canuckistan
• Freedom Folks
• Free Thoughts
• Fried Green Onions
• Gadfly
• Get Religion
• GOP Grunt
• Gov. Palin for President
• GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD
• Green Country Values
• Gribbit’s Word
• Hack Wilson
• Haemet
• Independent Voters Association
• Ironic Surrealism
• JammieWearingFool
• Johnson County, KS Elections
• Jubilee Int’l Ministries
• Jumping in Pools
• Kansas Progress
• Leslie Carbone
• Let’s Get It Right
• LiberalHypocrisy
• MajorityConnections
• Maggie’s Notebook
• Marginalized Action Dinosaur
• Michael Johns
• Miss Beth’s Victory Dance
• Monkey in the Middle
• Mostly Politics
• Muslihoon
• My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy
• NeoCon News
• New Republican Party Blog
• Nice Deb
• No Compromise When it Comes to Being Right!
• NoisyRoom.net
• No Sheeples Here!
• Nuke’s News & Views
• Okie Campaigns
• Ol’ Broad’s Ramblings
• Papa Mike’s Blog
• Policy in Action
• Political Fizz
• PostPolitical
• Principle over Party
• Psycmeistr’s Ice Palace!
• Publius Forum
• Radarsite
• Resistance is futile!
• RFC Radio: Radio for Conservatives
• Right Truth
• Right Voices
• Right Wing Wiz Kid
• Road Sassy
• Ron’s Musings
• Rosemary’s Thoughts
• Sally Kern
• Screw Loose Change
• Site-51
• State Political Blogs
• Stix Blog
• Stop the ACLU
• TechRepublican
• The Absurd Report
• The Almanack
• The Armchair Energist
• The Conservative Hawk
• The DaleyGator
• The Endive
• The Irate Nation
• The Lonely Conservative
• The LOUD Talker
• The Lunch Counter
• The Minority Report
• The Moderate Conservative
• The Political Commentator
• The Sundries Shack
• The Tennessee ConserVOLiance
• The Tygrrrr Express
• The Underground Conservative
• Thunder Run
• Tony Phyrillas
• Tracy Karol
• Truth Serum
• Universitas Veritas
• USA Partisan
• Velvet Hammer
• VirginianFederalist
• VOJ
• Wake up America
• Webloggin
• Western Front America
• Wyoming Vote Tracker
• YID With LID

Better Ways to get some Link Love

Those of you who are weary of my anti-blogroll rants (sorry, Ben!) will be happy to know that I’ve decided to take a more positive, user-friendly, happy, less-angry approach to encouraging my fellow bloggers to attract links without the silly mile-long list of blogs in the sidebar.

We all know links are necessary to build page rank. (We all DO know that, right? Of course we do.) And hopefully, we know by now that scripted blogrolls are not the way to do that effectively (see Why Blogrolling is Useless, and Using [and Abusing?] rel=”nofollow” to Preserve Page Rank.

S,o what are some better ways to attract linksthat are also search-engine friendly (Word for the day: in the SEO world, these are called “white hat” techniques, as opposed to “black hat” techniques that will only work until search engines like Google find a way to block them)?

1. Writing great original content that other bloggers and websites want to link to is always a good option (and the preferred one), then use your social networking skills to draw readers and bloggers to your content.
2. E-Mail other bloggers, with links to your best stories, and ask them to link to you. You might suggest a link exchange, in which you also link to one of their pillar posts, or a recent post.
3. Post an open invitation for bloggers to exchange links on a specific topic. For a good example of this in action, see Careerealism.
4. Create images or content with basic html code that for other bloggers to embed in their websites. One of the most well-known examples of this in action is ICanHazCheezburger.com

Do you have other ideas? We’d love to hear them!

What the A.P. is Missing

I was just reading an article at Tech Crunch asking the question, Does Google  Really Control the News?  While the story was not directly related to my thesis, it pointed out something that I had missed in the whole A.P. content controversy.  We’ve argued that the A.P. benefits when bloggers quote and link to them because we send them more traffic.  That’s certainly true as far as it goes but it’s not the end of the story.

Search engine rankings are based in large part on how many inbound links exist to your site, article, story, etc.  Every link boosts your ranking even if only minimally.  Links from larger sites with more traffic are more beneficial but all links help you.  So every time a blogger links to an A.P. story, not only does that directly drive some traffic from the link, it also helps improve the search engine ranking for that story at the A.P.

If all of us stopped linking to any A.P. stories, the result would be significantly lower search engine ranking for the A.P., resulting in much lower total traffic for them.  My particular site might be small but my impact is larger than just the traffic sent directly from my site because I also impact search engine rankings.

We hold more power than any of us generally believes but only if we act in concert.  Individually we can do very little.  I’d be willing to bet, however, that the loss of all blog links would do significant damage to traffic to the A.P. and they’d be forced to rethink their position.

Also see:

• Once Again: The A.P. Says It’s Going To Sue Aggregators
• Boycott the A.P.!
• The Washington Times Copies the AP – Starts Charging Bloggers to Quote Them

 

Wednesday Web 2.0 Q&A

The idea for this new feature, and the questions for this week are from Ben Hodge, of Kansas Progress. If you have questions you would like answered in upcoming posts, or if you have additional story ideas, please e-mail Jenn.

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Q. Can you explain twitter to me? My understanding is that if I really thought way too highly of myself and thought that people would care about what I was doing every 10 minutes of the day, that I would “twitter” them. But why are other groups on twitter, when RSS does almost the same thing?

A. Twitter is a developing phenomenon. Yes, there are some people that literally use it to keep in touch with their “friends” throughout the day, but there are a bunch of conservatives there now that are using it for legitimate networking purposes. Check out TCOT, (the feed is here)and TCON (feed).

 Even if you don’t really do much with your account there, however, any posts you do rank very high in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). You can use Twitterfeed to have your Twitter account automatically updated with your blog posts, too, which is a very convenient feature. You do NOT have to tell anyone what you’re having for lunch or where.

In fact, for general networking, it’s probably better not to do a lot of “small talk” (a little is fine – lets people know they’re dealing with a real person). Also see: Twitter, Twitter Everywhere

Q. Which [social networking] sites should I join…How often must they be updated?

A. It’s really a good idea just to at least “reserve” your name on the major social networking/bookmarking sites. It usually takes just a few minutes, and you really don’t have to keep MOST* of them updated. It’s amazing what a political adversary can/will do to ruin your online reputation. The added advantage of these is that many of them give you a chance to enter your own blog URL, and that will help you with linkage.

Facebook, Linked-IN, and Twitter are the “Biggies” right now. YouTube is great, even if you just set up an account there for the purposes of watching (not uploading). Naymz and Plaxo rank high on the search engines, too.

 Beyond that, it’s just really up to you. There are hundreds of these sites, and you have to draw the line somewhere. The next tier down would be del.icio.us, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Digg, and Propeller.  Stay tuned for an upcoming study to be released soon on which news, indexes, and social networking sites rank highest on Google.

*How often to update? Well, keep in mind that with the social networking sites, you tend to get out of them what you put in, so it’s good to be active in at least a couple. We have received (unconfirmed) information that Twitter may soon start deleting accounts that are over 180 days old. Also, some search engines give less weight or refuse to count links that are over six months old, so it’s a good idea to check on your accounts, even the ones you’re not “active” on at least twice a year.

 Q. [In terms of Search Engine Optimization], if [the links I put on Social Networking sites] don’t “look like” links, but merely show the URL, does that matter?

A. Some social networking sites, such as Facebook and Digg.com, don’t allow “hyperlinks,” (text that points to another URL) or any text that contains html. You won’t need to worry about this for SEO, because the search engines are reading the source code, and will recognize the link, anyway.

This is a valid question to address, however, because on your own blog posts, you can maximize the benefit of internal and external links by properly using “anchor text.” In a nutshell, this means that it is better to format a link to your blog like this: Ft. Hard Knox, rather than like this. For more information on anchor text, see Don’t be Link-Lovin’ in Vain (Judiciously using ‘Anchor Text’).

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Trackbacks: Win-Win for Bloggers

As political conservatives, we’ve learned the importance of linking to other conservative bloggers, to promote conservatism online. Exchanging links helps us increase our own, and other bloggers page rank.

There’s another advantage to linking to other bloggers. If the blogger you’re linking to has “trackbacks” enabled, a link will be posted in that blogger’s comment section, and readers who are interested in related stories will be directed back to your blog.

Some bloggers, such as Ft. Hard Knox, Michelle Malkin, and Patrick Ruffini have featured trackback sections, and other bloggers show the trackbacks as comments. Either way, readers who are researching for information on the topic of your article are able to find you from the blog you have linked to.

Also see:

• Enough Already! We’re Blog UNRolling
• Why Blogrolling is Useless
• Using (and Abusing) rel=”nofollow” to Preserve Page Rank

Why Blogrolling is Useless (Updated)

Shortly after FHK launched we began searching for ways to increase our rankings on the search engines. The prevailing wisdom was that one good way to do this is to maintain a blogroll (that’s the ridiculously long list of blogs in the sidebar of many blogs), as it is a good way for bloggers to exchange much needed “links,” increase their link count, and move up in the ratings. Read more