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The New "Next Blog" Link - What Next?

Up until last week, I would advise folks looking for traffic to their blogs that they should publish, publish, publish.
Besides friends and family, your initial readers will come through the "Next Blog" link, randomly. You get more "Next Blog" traffic from posting more, less from posting less. And, you'll need this initial traffic.
Last week, with the new "Next Blog" link, all of that changed. Now, people hitting "Next Blog" get another blog, but with 2 major differences from the possibility last week.
  • The "next blog" linked to will be chosen for similar content / subject, and same language, as the blog being displayed currently.
  • The "next blog" linked to will not be chosen relevant to updating activity. You're just as likely to get a blog published to 5 years ago, as 5 minutes ago.


This gives us two concerns, which we did not have earlier.
  • Finding other blogs of random subject and recent updates won't be as simple as hitting the "Next Blog" link.
  • Getting initial traffic to your blog won't be as simple as merely "publish, publish, publish".


Instead of the "Next Blog" link bringing you random visitors, you may get more focused visitors.
  • Blogger Profile surfing. You create your Blogger profile, and indicate your various interests. You can find other people like you, when you click on your various interests. People like you will find your profile, and others like yours, when they surf from their profile.
  • Google Blog Search. Once your blog has value to the search engines, people searching for subject related content will find your blog.
  • Next Blog surfing. People will still find your blog using "Next Blog", they will simply start from a blog similar to yours, not one of random content.


Having found other blogs through any of the above techniques, you can attract traffic to your blog by becoming a Follower of blogs that interest you. You can find other blogs by surfing from those blogs, and other people who surf those blogs may, similarly, find your blog.

None of the above techniques will attract traffic based upon posting activity, though. Whether you post daily, or yearly, you'll be just as likely to attract traffic. And you'll be more likely to surf to other blogs with subject similar to your blog. And this brings us to the final (and possibly primary) result of the new "Next Blog" link.

Spam blogs, published by the thousands, will receive significantly less traffic, and our blogs will receive, relatively, more traffic.
  • Unless you start from a blog dedicated to hacking, porn, or spam, "Next Blog" will be less likely to bring you to a blog with hacking, porn, or spam.
  • Publishing a blog 100 times / day will bring a spammer as much random traffic as publishing once / week, or once / year.


This will reduce the benefit of spammers who post splog farms, since 1,000 splogs today will probably attract as much traffic as 1 splog last week, and updating a splog once / year will likely attract as much traffic as once / day. This should contribute to decreased visibility and presence of the hundreds of thousand member splog farms, so common these days.

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Comments

Marf said…
Yeah. Instead the spammers have just refocoused their efforts toward comment spam on other blogs.
Nitecruzr said…
Marf,

What you say makes sense, but to be honest, I haven't seen any dramatic increase in spam comments against my blogs. I wonder if the spammers focus their efforts on people who encourage them in some way. How do you handle spam comments?
traveler818 said…
I'm just plain lost.
I really liked your answer for the question on blogger about how to keep a blog high ranked. You offered some really useful tips.

Cheers for that.

www.giddyfingers.com
Anonymous said…
Excellent tips!

www.nineshortmonths.blogspot.com
Unknown said…
Good to know how that whole "next blog" stuff works.
Emma Paige said…
I started my blog a couple of months ago and i still have no followers (excpet myself it says) sad face :( i do however tweet my blog and facebook it sometimes, but other than that, nada :(
Unknown said…
i get traffic from a russian blog, thanks!
Debra Seiling said…
I started a blog a couple of months ago and am unsure of how to get more traffic. Thanks for the detailed explanation.It was very helpful. Debbie http://bible-passages.blogspot.com
Unknown said…
I'm a little confused by the changes. It sounds to me like the changes are a good thing, because if you click next blog, you end up getting results that are close to your own niche and you are less likely to get spam. Am I understanding this correctly?

You left me a fantastic list of articles on Blogger on a post in the Blogger forum and I'm slowly but surely working my way through them. I'm learning a lot. Thank you so much!

http://myinspiredlifewithfibromyalgia.blogspot.com/
Nitecruzr said…
Emily,

If you can see the larger picture, then yes, the changes are a good thing. The unfortunate thing is that Blogger doesn't spend a lot of time describing their changes, and why they make them. Their "Buzz" articles just scrape the surface.

Country Code aliases.
Dynamic Templates.
New Blogger Interface.
Auto Pagination.
Spam Classification.

That's just 5 major changes that Blogger has made to their service, that has been grossly misunderstood by many. And some spammers are trying to use my attempts to document these changes, objectively, as an excuse for attacking me - necessitating my updated commenting policy.

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2005/06/commenting-policy.html
Unknown said…
So is this feature automatic on Blogger or is it something we need to sign up for?
Nitecruzr said…
Kristian,

As long as you don't hide the navbar, on your blog, then your blog has it.
Unknown said…
Was not aware of this, so am going to check it out, as well as manually searching for blogs in my niche and adding some in my sidebar. Thanks!

http://jacgems.blogspot.com
Viki Sangre said…
More post more traffic for Next Blog....Great

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