We're Going to Need Links

Call me oldfashioned, but I don't really like the whole "carrot on a stick" approach with a point system. If the users of this site generate a lot of content with blog entries, comments and forum threads, the search engines will pick up on it. Of course there is always a bonus having a link on other pages, but referrals aren't worth much compared to the content the link is referring to.

Just an observation.

I dub thee old-fashioned.

Links are worth tons. Links, among other factors, are what draw search engines and earn Search results listings. We need to generate some search traffic if we want to maintain a flow of new users into the site at this stage. As I said above, how many can we count on from the single pipes.org link?

While I know that good content will attract links naturally, I do not want to see the community die in the volatile time between launching, and the link count increasing to the point where we get search rankings, a somewhat steady flow of new users and more. I have lost community sites in that gap before, and it is very difficult to get the ball rolling again after that point.

Hope that explains my intentions better.

Search engines find new sites by using technology called a "spider". A spider crawls the web (get it?), going through it's database of websites, and then reads the pages to see what on them. If it finds a new link, it follows it and reads that page as well. So, the fastest way to get into a search engine is to get other sites that are already in there to link to you. A quick Google search for "my-pipes" does not return this site on the front page (rght now), but maybe this site will get on there during the next spider run.

Also, search engine like Google rank pages based on the number of times other sites link to it with certain text as the link. For example, if hundreds of sites linked to this one with the text "pipes", then this page would rank pretty high on their search results.

More or less dead on. Of course, lots of people underestimate the importance of search listings to the success of a site...

I put a link on my website.  Google still isn't listing this page when you search for my-pipes, but hopefully that will change in the next few weeks.  Apart from thos who came via ASP and pipes.org, I wonder how many people have found this site.
Cheers,
Josh

Hi Josh, and thanks for the link. We are getting a small amount of seartch traffic, but 99% of it is from ASP and pipes.org. I am hoping to boost the link ranking a bit, to get the search traffic up.

All things in good time :p 

I added my-pipes links in four of my sites. They don't get much traffic since they are used mostly to push my business site up in the listings, and it seems to work, so I hope it helps.

Thanks Rob!