Introducing Steem linkback bot (alpha version)
Metcalfe's law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2)
Please welcome @linkback-bot-v0
Need personalized data?
If you are interested in personalized analytics for your Steem posts or have any suggestions for the linkback bot get in touch with me (@ontofractal) on steemit.chat.
Why build a linkback bot for Steem?
- To increase follower counts of related authors by providing additional discovery mechanism
- To help current collection authors that have to manually announce linkbacks in comments
- To increase payouts for authors of high quality collections and referenced authors
- To increase of number of posts linking out by providing incentives to do so
- To increase number of views per visit and time spent interacting with Steem
- To increase steemit.com traffic from search engines
- For fun and profit
At the alpha stage bot will run with limited capacity and features.
Historical perspective
A linkback is a method for Web authors to obtain notifications when other authors link to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to, their articles.
Linkbacks - wiki in some form were succesffully introduced by most major publishing platforms including WordPress and Blogger.
Real world implementations:
- Trackbacks on Movable Type
- Pingbacks on WordPress
- Webmentions is a latest attempt at creating a standard for linkbacks. RFC available.
SEO benefits of linkbacks
With a steady growth of unique content on steemit.com and inbound links from other websites, search engines will become a major source of new Steemit users. Internal linking strategy is a crucial part of general search traffic acquisition strategy.
A quote from Rand Fishkin, Moz CEO about internal links
This is a very positive thing. It cannot only help to get those pages indexed and crawled, it may also help them rank higher with a few caveats. So the right internal links, good ones, can have a large positive impact across a big website.
Internal links that tend to perform the best, the ones that help the most tend to be the ones that drive real traffic, and they sort of continue a visitor's journey. They help people find what they're looking for, and it's also the case that the ones that don't drive traffic, that aren't perceived as helpful seem to have less of an impact on the pages they link to.
Spam
Spam is a possible problem. During the alpha stage bot algorithm will apply restrictions to exclude spammy posts designed to generate linkbacks.
Roadmap
Linkback bot is under active development.
- Author analytics
- Personal analytics
- Tag analytics
- Mention and linkbacks notifications by twitter, etc
- Possible link weighting by rewards
- Spam prevention features
Very cool concept. Will it inform the author what blogs they are used in?
Well, it sort of does by posting linkbacks in comments. In future I am considering using twitter or whatsup for instant notifications for post authors. Also @mentions tracking coming soon.
Sounds interesting. I would like to know more, especially if it can provide better metrics to understand views both in Steemit and external sites. I assume it does not break any of the Steemit rules or accepted practices?
Yep, I'll be publishing first metrics insights soon. I am not aware of any Steemit rules that linkback bot could be breaking and I have included some info on best linkback practices in the historical perspective part of the post.
Great idea. When will it become available?
It's already doing it's job, just in a rate-limited, restricted mode. Have a look at the @linkback-bot-v0 comment feed.
Linkback bot just found one of my posts! Looking forward to seeing what data comes out of this.
Really cool bot! Upvoted! This will let us know where our posts were promoted or mentioned. Cool!