blog.rightreading.com

The image at right is a selection from my inlinks tag in Google Reader. It shows websites that have been linking to mine (these are all via Google Blog Search). This is less than a single day’s sample. As you can see, all of a sudden many people are posting links on their blogs to my glossary of book publishing terms.

I’m sure the number of links is not staggering compared to pages that go viral on places like Digg. Still, the glossary has gotten about 5,000 views over the past five days.

Laura Resnick was thoughful enough to send me an e-mail explaining, “In case no one has already told you, a link to your delightful Publishing Glossary has lately been passed around various private e-lists of professional writers, and we’re enjoying the glossary very much! Thanks for a good laugh.”

Thanks to the writers for sharing the link to my site rather than just ripping off the content. I guess writers are a good group to engage if you’re looking for links, since these days they all have blogs and they are motivated to, well, write. (I’d also guess from this list that writers will always need proofreaders.) The ones who linked back to me seemed a genial and generous lot.

This page first went up back in 2006. It’s gotten a bunch of links over the years, but never such a big flood all at once as this. I’ve made no effort at link-building, so this is what a “natural” wave of links looks like. How would Google distinguish this natural wave of links from the kinds of “artificial” link-building campaigns that they say they discount in their search result rankings?