Category: 
- announce it. you saw me do that yesterday. announcing it ensures that your expression of endorsement, friendship, commonality, or whatever, is made visible to spiders.
- click it. providing a link isn’t enough. if you want that link to show up in that blogger’s statistics, clicking the link you just made is essential. the spiders may eventually discover the link you provided in your post about blogrolling said blogger, but that can be up to three-to-four weeks later. after someone else has clicked the link in your blogroll. repeatedly. faithfully, even.
one thing that spiders do recognize is link titles. link titles are a handy way to increase the visibility of your site through your blogroll, and to increase the visibility of those whom you blogroll. link titles are a win-win for everyone involved. Wordpress’ blogroll system, for example, uses a “Description” field that is rendered as link titles in the blogroll. what i do when i blogroll someone is use their blog’s tagline as their blogroll description. this results in very nice links in this particular theme, which provides a specially-formatted popup for link titles. so, if for example, your blog has a tagline of “i like to eat live chickens”, anyone who does a search on “eat live chickens” will find not only you, but by association, me—provided, of course, that the link from me to you is clicked on.
as mentioned above, the best way to draw attention to something is to click a link to it. when that link has a link title, the link title becomes part of the information chain, and as a result, gets slightly more rapidly recognized by search engines than “normal links”. something to think about.
if you think that through a bit, then the best way to show your love for another blogger is obviously to…er…love them. that means click links to them instead of just going there through your bookmarks or RSS feeds (because getting the feed in your newsreader already tells them that you love them…a little bit…like as much love as it takes to just browse there…which is really something on the busy days, but not much otherwise). if you want to make sure that they understand your love really does come from you, even when you don’t have time to comment, use your own blogroll to visit them. so, in that regard, it should be relatively obvious to those whom i blogroll that at least one visit per day/week/month whatever actually does come from yours truly. because i love you.
in a wholly plutonic, non-sexual way.
except for the monkeys.
maybe.
which brings me to one last point. Wordpress stats automatically ignore blog subscribers at the authorial level and above. i don’t know if Blogger or Typepad or Wordpooty or anyone else does that. you can set up some statistical services such as SiteMeter and Google Analytics to ignore your own visits to your blog as well. for your own sense of self-worth, it’s probably better to be honest with yourself and have whatever stats utility you use ignore your own visits to your blog. otherwise, if you’re continually visiting your own blog as a launching pad to your blogroll members, your blog’s statistics will be falsely inflated.
like those right-wing blogs.
anyway, as seen elsewhere and elsewhere ad nauseum, here’s my whole blogroll in a post. feed well, little spiders!!!
(and thank you to all those who picked up on this. reminding spiders about our existence is a good thing. it won’t feed any starving children, pull any troops out of Iraq, colonize the moon, or ensure that all future elections are handled ethically, but finding ways for our voices to be heard and our talents to be displayed is certainly not pointless.)
AwwRight! … “a provocateur!”
Thanks for the mention, D. If I understood any of that explanation (which I don’t, being essentially e-tarded) I’d probably follow suit!
But I am blogrolling you so I can visit through my blogroll instead of looking up your comments every darned time
“so, if for example, your blog has a tagline of “i like to eat live chickens”, anyone who does a search on “eat live chickens” will find not only you, but by association, me—provided, of course, that the link from me to you is clicked on.”
Geez… All I would end up with is a bunch of plastered people showing up at my place with my tagline. LOL
This post is definitely some food for thought. But I already use the links on my Blogroll to go to all of the Blogs there. I think that most people use readers these days, but I want people to know I have visited from my place. Now I know that that was/is a good policy for practical purposes. I’ll have to add the practice of announcing links.