Interesting commentary, also here. To be honest, I only added the explanation link to the Popularity Contest percentage after getting lots of questions about what it meant. I certainly didn’t intend to benefit from the link to the explanation page… who wants GoogleJuice™ to a random page with a ? as the keyword? I did think that a side effect might be people liking the idea and choosing to download the plugin themselves, so I guess my intentions were not completely pure.
It’s always interesting to see people assign motives to my actions, especially when the motives are their own invention and were often never something I considered. Something about hindsight being 20/20 might be appropriate to insert here…
adam adds this Comment:
technorati seems to be really bad at deciphering what are legitimate links and what aren’t. their “solution” of just outright removing the offending blog is more evil than anything out of the google camp, too.
nonetheless, i rarely use any plugin that inserts a linkback inside my content area, since it’s really unreasonable to expect a search engine to be able to decipher that such a link isn’t, indeed, part of my content.
December 19th, 2007 at 7:54 pm
Brad Jasper adds this Comment:
Alex,
Don’t worry about what other people assume your motives are, I personally see nothing wrong with the ? link. And if any plugin deserves a link–it would be Popularity Contest.
On the other hand, I’ve seen plugins that add a link to the footer to a specific page without telling you–that
December 19th, 2007 at 8:14 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
I will note that when I added the link by default to the plugin, I also added a way to easily remove it and included that information in the README.
December 19th, 2007 at 11:04 pm
Stephen Cronin adds this Comment:
I was considering adding a link to a sidebar widget of one of my plugins, so I ran poll on whether people would be worried by plugins promoting themselves. Only 42 people responded, but almost everyone said it was fine (if there was the option to opt out). Most felt it was a fair reward for providing a valuable service.
I ended up leaving the link out (for design reasons) and I’m glad about that now. Having said, I’m a small fish, so they wouldn’t have noticed me anyway!
I guess there is a legitimate issue to be discussed here, but personally, I have no problem with someone such as yourself including a link.
December 20th, 2007 at 2:55 am
at Citizen Jake adds this Pingback:
[...] up on yesterday’s post, Alex King gives his thoughts on being banned from the Technorati Top [...]
December 20th, 2007 at 9:28 am
Jeffro2pt0 adds this Comment:
Alex, I think a number of people have taking what I wrote out of context and I clearly illustrated my point within the comments section of the article I wrote.
I think a few people see the post I wrote as me getting on the cases of those who have gamed the system on purpose when that isn’t true. Putting a credit link within something you created and are sharing for free has been a standard practice for some time. The problem lies within Technorati and their messed up algorithm which can’t discern a regular link from a credit link if there is such a difference.
December 20th, 2007 at 3:45 pm