Was inspired by a new post over at Weblog Tools Collection about site promotion. Basically, what the author of that site was/is offering is a chance for the first twenty or so commenters to have their websites promoted officially in a fresh post on that site. The reason this is a big deal is that site is very well ranked and seems to have a lot of traffic (seeing as it’s piped into all the admin areas of WordPress installs). A nice prominent link from a high profile site is a great way to build your readership and search engine rankings.

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to do an open thread here for that same purpose. Give regular readers a chance to find some new sites and give a chance for site owners to get some new readers. So if you have a blog or other website related to Pop Occulture-type stuff, leave a brief comment below and include your URL. I will put together the first twenty (or more - who knows!) into a new post. (Also, if you have one particular post that you think is awesome, maybe link to that) Your blog has to have some nice original content in it and have more than just a couple posts in it to qualify. And as Mark said on the site that I’m ripping this idea off of: “If you are an author and have posted your link, don’t forget to come back and check on the other blogs on the list. You might find some reading material you like.”

PS. The difference between posting a link in my comments section and me posting it as a separate item is that WordPress adds in a bit of code to commenter links which reads rel=’nofollow’. Sometimes referred to as a link condom, this prevents spammers from getting better search rankings by leaving links on people’s sites. Of course, spamming is mostly done by automated scripts which just try to blast everybody and don’t bother to check if a site has the link condom enabled. In any event, my posting a link to you personally will help you in the long-run ranking-wise (since there’s no link condom when I post).

I might end up making this a regular thing too, or find some other ways that we can all share readers more readily. Any ideas on how to do that, also feel free to include those below.