I’ve mentioned before that I do my best to give a little something back to people who link to me, but during my recent flood of traffic, I found that sifting through incoming links would eat entire days. I won’t pretend that I minded, but I wondered if there was a more automated method of thanking linkers for people who have jobs that get in the way of spending eight hours a day dedicated to their blogs. Well, there is, and it’s really easy to implement.

If you’re running Wordpress, you have probably seen the “Incoming Links” panel on your dashboard that lists people who are linking to you. With Wordpress 2.3 and above, that data is simply an RSS feed from Google blogs. Because that same RSS feed can be added to your sidebar through an RSS widget, giving a link back to people who link to you is a snap.

Adding Your Incoming Links To Your Sidebar

Note: These instructions were written for Wordpress 2.5.1 The idea is the same if you are running a different version, but the exact instructions may need to be adjusted.

1. Open your Wordpress dashboard.
2. On your Incoming Links section, right click on RSS and copy the link by Clicking “Copy Link Location” in Firefox, “Copy Shortcut” in IE, or the appropriate link copying command for your web browser.
3. Now Click Design and then Widgets to go to your widgets page.
4. Scroll down and click Add next to the RSS widget to add it to your sidebar. It will then appear on the right side.
5. On the right side, Click Edit next to RSS.
6. Paste the feed you copied in step 2 into the box titled: Enter the RSS feed URL here:”
7. Add a title such as “People Who Link To Me” and set any other options you prefer.
8. Click Change and then Save Changes. You should now see a list of your incoming links in your sidebar.

Benefits and Drawbacks

The benefit of this is that as soon Google knows that someone gives you a link, they show up on this list with no effort on your part. That not only gives credit to those who already link to you, but encourages others because they know that you try to give back to people who are good to you.

Because the process is automatic, the major drawback is that you lose the ability to filter out links based on your personal preferences. As long as most people are linking to you because they like you and not just for the return link, this really shouldn’t be a problem, but it is something to think about.

If people are constantly linking to you from ad filled porn pages, or you feel the need to manually filter your links, you can always manually add links to your WordPress blogroll and use a plugin like Buddy Love to display them for you.

Note: Links in the RSS widget are dofollow by default. If you want to set them to nofollow, it requires a simple hack to a Wordpress core file. See How To Set The WordPress RSS Widget To NoFollow for more information.

Posted in Blogging