De-linking from Today

I was just browsing on the Today site, and I saw that of the ten blogs on the front-page "Top Blogs" list, three were inactive.

So I guess that's a business model, of a sort, for Today.com -- they encourage people to write by promising income from page views that will accumulate slowly, over time -- encouraging the bloggers to take the long view -- and then Today gets rid of a lot of the bloggers, one way or another, and keeps that long-term income for themselves.

I encourage everyone to try and undo any links you may still have to your Today blogs -- either links that you have placed on other sites such as social networking sites, or links that other people have placed from their own sites, that point to your Today blog(s).




If you go to Yahoo.com and search on "link:yourblogname.today.com" you'll get a list of everyone who has linked to the blog. (Doing this search on Yahoo returns far more items than a similar search on Google.) (Set the "Show inlinks" box at the top to "Except for this domain" to filter out all the internal links, so the list will be easier to read).

I found places there that linked to me that I had forgotten about. I wrote to some of those people, and explained the situation, and they were very sympathetic and took the links down right away.

The de-linking worked. While I was at Today, my LOST blog had a Google page rank of 3. By de-linking as much as I could, I was able to get the page rank to drop to 2.

That means fewer hits for Today. It also means less competition for my new LOST blog. When I first started my new blog, the Today blog was showing up higher on many searches, which was very frustrating. That doesn't happen any more.

The three inactive blogs in Today's current top ten aren't blogs by Exiles, and I don't know why those particular individuals left, whether they were kicked out, discouraged by pay cuts or the oppressive atmosphere, or whether life simply got in the way. But I think that many of the blogs written by Exiles, which were popular blogs to begin with, must still be doing well at Today, still bringing in hits even though they haven't been updated in months. Those are hits that are coming in now because of all the hard work we did then to set up our blogs for long-term growth, hits that were promised to us, hits that Today took for itself using fraudulent business practices. It's only fair to try to reverse that.

Photo "Broken Chain" by Austin Osuide:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/austinosuide/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0