Duncan Riley of the Blog Herald has written an excellent piece examining how links function and build traffic in blogs. Understanding links, their value and structure splits links into those that come from search engines, and those that are from other sites. Riley creates a further division based on the type of site a link comes from, such as a search engine, a static site or another blog. Links from blogs fall into ‘primary links’ such as being named and linked to in a post and ’secondary links’ where you are quoted as the source of a piece and finally navigational links such as those that appear in blogrolls.
Under further analysis Duncan Riley grades the value of the incoming links according to the profile and popularity of the blog that is linking to you. After pointing out the advantages and disadvantages of various grades of links Duncan Riley explores points out how links influence blog promotion.
