Andrew Denny has a post on his blog GrannyButtons about blogs and links.
Basically he’d commented in his blog about a post on another blog about a new Marina development. As you’d expect he had included links to the original blog entry in his blog.
The writer of that blog seemed to take offence at Andrews interpretation of the blog entry and posted a new blog entry going off in a bit of a huff about Andrew’s interpretation.
Rather than link back to Andrew’s blog entry this person simply referred to Andrew as “a pretend boater who only spend a few days a year on the Cut”. This person also doesn’t allow comments on his blog entries.
Now I’ve always believed that blogs should be dynamic. Posting a blog entry with no links from it and blocking comments and trackbacks is rather like publishing a column in a newspaper and never publishing any feedback. By adding links and trackbacks to a blog entry it adds context to the entry – for example you can easily, in one click, go and read Andrews original article which made me sit down and write this blog entry.
Of course linking and trackbacks on blogs do more than just add context to that entry, they also help raise the profile of the blogs/websites concerned as search engine spiders will follow the links. This second fact is the whole drive behind the spamming of blogs and abuse of trackbacks – if you have a popular, well ranked site, then getting links off your site to a site selling dodgy drugs will help the spammers.