About Wildlife Photographic Blog

Why did I start this site?

My theory is that conventional hot lists don't work particularly well for all their members. Before I start I ought to stress two things. Firstly this is entirely personal opinion, and secondly I am not saying wildlife blog hotlists are in any way wrong!

So why do I think hotlists don't work?

The main reason to be a hotlist member is to direct traffic to your website and publicize your photographs. Ideally this works in two ways. Firstly people will click on your link from the hotlist. Secondly being on the hotlist should help your site get a higher ranking in searches.

Lets be honest, both of these methods do work to a degree. If your site is popular then it will appear high up on the hotlist. If it appears on the front page then it may well get click-throughs. It also benefits from being on the highest-ranked page on the hotlist

However, if your link appears on a later page you are unlikely to see many click-throughs. You also get significantly less benefit from the hotlist's ranking. The hotlist itself however benefits from having loads of links (both high and low value) pointing towards it's main page.

In short hotlists help make popular sites more popular by gathering page rank from all member sites to distribute amongst the most popular sites.

So how does a blog aggregator help this?

Appearing on the aggregator front page is determined by last posting date not popularity. Also the entries themselves serve as a teaser to current content not a static description of what the blog is about.

There are still issues of course. Ephemeral links have less long term value than permenant links. Those who blog more frequently will appear more frequently. The presence of the aggregator may mean also mean people read your post there rather than visit your site.

The hope is, however, by combining the voting power of all the contributing blogs the aggregator's rank increases. Because it changes frequently it should get spidered frequently. Also because it changes frequently it should redistribute its ranking more evenly amongst its contributors. That's the theory anyway. The only way to see if it works is to try it

In addition, all WPB entries are replubished via the Twitter feed which potentially distribute member postings to a wider audience. This should bring in an element of both one-off traffic and new subscribers.