Interactive Marketing Blog

I don’t know if you’ve noticed it but for the last couple of months, I’ve seen an interesting trend – “number of outbound links to Wikipedia has declined“.

More so, even I’ve stopped using it as a reference link in many of my blog posts. Considering this, once upon a time, I used to use it many a times in my previous blog posts. Suddenly things have changed from last year I guess.

Though reasons are many like I write about niche category which I believe my readers are quite well versed with. So I don’t feel any reason why I should use it (bearing the fact that it gives some providence in the so-called link structure of the web and some Google juice perhaps!). But there’s something more to it than just on the surface.

With this question in mind, I ventured into darkness to find out my reasoning and invested my time on BlogPulse (which basically allows to create graphs that visually track “buzz” over time for certain keywords, phrases or links) which I discovered the other day to help me figure out some trend.

I pegged Wikipedia with 2 other keywords which are most found across the web i.e. Google and other being Twitter (since its the major buzzword people are talking about and linking to). Here is what I found:

Interesting chart! From 8th-18th March, 2009 something happened and even went on to touch 4% of web’s outbound link on 14th March and my hypothesis supposedly went for a toss. Though I clearly don’t have much idea and probing deeper into the web didn’t fetch me clear results too (may be you can help me figure it out). But overall the chart is pretty clear. The overall link structure of the web is lopsided towards upcoming trend; here in this case, Google and Twitter since for the past 6 months, lot of things have happened in their house.

I guess “reference blogging” is seeing is doomsday and making its way for hotter topics; for example, you might have seen how many big short tech blogs are emaculately selecting twitter trending keywords to feature on the top. That’s one shot to gain heights for sure. Though that’s fine since at the end of the day, all it matters is contentas I can still voice loudly saying content is the king in interconnected, twisted, structured and multi-layered web.