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Much of blogging seems to me to be recycling of links. If you send BloggerA an email suggesting he looks at your site, and he then uses something in a post of his, the chances are BloggersB, C and D will then pick up on it and also link.
It's also quite easy to get bloggers attention. Simply make a couple of complimentary comments on their sites, and within a couple of days they'll have checked your site out. Follow this up with an email saying 'Hey, I really enjoy your blog. Have you seen my site?' or something and they'll return the compliment and you can work from there into getting a mention in a posting.
If you can come up with one original / funny article that gets picked up by lots of blogs, you're laughing - those links will stay in archives forever.
Ideally you want a link in their sidebars - these appear on every page of their blog, and you can get dozens of links for the price of one.
I think that may be overstating it. Blog links require human editorial intervention on the linked from site. Guest book links require none. They are totally different, both from a SEO strategy point of view, and how SE's treat them.
They are different, but only treated different because Google has started filtering the guestbook ones. The blog ones are much more insidious in that guestbook links are just that, "guest" links. You get one per site. Blogs are worse in that the generation of dozens/hundreds of low or zero content pages can occur with "sidebar" links on each page. In other words, they are just spam link pages similar to the html spam pages exploding everywhere because all Google cares about is volume of links and their anchor text.
Arnett, Google is updating backlinks regularly, most recently a week ago, and then three+ weeks before that.
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My guess is Google will eventually filter out blog links to their own serps, but till them they will be a pestilence.
I think some get mad at the bloggers because they put literally zero attention into search engine placements yet many of them are able to get decent PRs and do well in the SERP. They post info with little to no optimization and link to sites based on common interest or same subject and don't worry about their SE standing. Those who spend a lot of time and are not getting anywhere really ought to study the blog community. They'll actually teach you how to be more productive and which areas you're wasting your time.
Well nobody did. Obviously that isn't the case. The point is that they can be used this way now.
"bloggers because they put literally zero attention into search engine placements"
You might want to do a search for google bombing... Using blogs to manioulate search engine placement is very old news.