Beware of Blog Carnivals | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

I read this and found it really interesting. Thanks for sharing! I'd love to hear other people's opinions. Any hard evidence that either agrees or disagrees with this? I've always assumed it was a good way to get links but this definitely makes me question it.

Haha, very good point. In any case, I'd like to hear what others have to say.

I really appreciated this post, Michael.  With a brand new blog like mine, it can be tough to get your material out there, so carnivals seem like a smart option.  Your experience definitely gives me pause, and I think I'll be holding off on submitting to blog carnivals for now.  Thanks again for the insight!

annielogue said:

Interesting. I might still do it because I need some traffic, but the comments have some good advice – as does your article. Thank you!

 

Annie

For what it's worth, I've been submitting to carnivals for a while and I only ever got real traffic from one. And that traffic was very fleeting. So my only reason for continuing to do it was to strengthen my link profile, which this seems to show is a bad idea.

MoneyBeagle said:

My experience is that only 'Editors Picks' seem to gather any noticeable traffic, and more often than not, those picks seem to go more established blogs that probably see lower benefit from that traffic compared to the boost that a newer, low-traffic blog would see.

Those editors picks are great, and are how people like Trent at Simple Dollar found my site and posted my links in their roundups. Those often get 1,000-1,500+ visits for me.

There are some well intended carnivals out there that will probably just end up suffering because of big G frowning on the tons of spam driven pure link juice ones, and not knowing how to tell the difference.

I've always been too lazy to participate in carnivals, so I guess this is one instance where my laziness ended up being an okay move.

colormefrugal said:

Thank you so much for posting this.  I just started my blog three months ago and I have been working hard on getting as many links as possible so I've been submitting to carnivals, commenting all over the place, etc.  As a result, my Alexa rank has dropped pretty quickly, but I have been scratching my head the whole time about why, despite my best efforts to read up on SEO and do it as well as possible, I have stayed at pitiful search engine traffic levels.  Seriously pitiful.  Now, it could be that I am just not very good at SEO.  It could totally be that.  But I think I am going to do a little experiment and stop submitting to carnivals and try to remove those links to see if that has an impact. 

Hey Dee,

You don't need to remove the links.  I am sure you probably aren't penalized.  Three months is not much time to see a true impact.  There are very few bloggers that hit the ground running, so patience is key.  Removing the links will just take time and energy that you can focus on other things.  It takes Google time to warm up to new sites.  There are so many popping up every day, but only stay around for a little while that Google tends to be patient.

debtroundup said:

You don't need to remove the links.  I am sure you probably aren't penalized.  Three months is not much time to see a true impact.  There are very few bloggers that hit the ground running, so patience is key.  Removing the links will just take time and energy that you can focus on other things.  It takes Google time to warm up to new sites.  There are so many popping up every day, but only stay around for a little while that Google tends to be patient.

Honestly, you can't really know if she need to remove them or not. I would further argue that three months of carnival submissions isn't very much so it would be very easy to clean up those links. We're talking a couple of hours at the very most. Once this is done, you can be 100% confident that they're not hurting you — and who knows? You may see a boost in search traffic.

Post edited 7:37 pm – January 26, 2014 by debtroundup

michael @ financial ramblings said:

Honestly, you can't really know if she need to remove them or not. I would further argue that three months of carnival submissions isn't very much so it would be very easy to clean up those links. We're talking a couple of hours at the very most. Once this is done, you can be 100% confident that they're not hurting you — and who knows? You may see a boost in search traffic.

While I don't know if she needs to remove them, I don't think we should be telling everyone to remove them.  There are way too many variables to be considered before we blanket advice.