How do I use Mr. Linky?

When you are hosting a carnival (e.g., Works-For-Me Wednesday or the Blogging Story carnival) you are inviting people to write on a specific topic. You give them the topic, which day they need to post the blog entry on that topic, then ask them to come back to your site and submit their link so everyone can see what everyone else wrote.

Carnivals are a great way to improve traffic to your site by hosting, but also through participation. The beauty of a carnival is that links to all the participating blogs are in one place (the host blog). The best way we've found to host all these links easily is a program called Mr. Linky. You can see Mr. Linky in action every Wednesday at Shannon's Works-For-Me Wednesday extravaganza.

To get started with Mr. Linky:

1. Create an account at the Mr. Linky site.
2. Next, click on the Wizard link at the top of the page.
3. Choose your server (e.g., Typepad, Blogger, Wordpress).
4. Choose the widget you want to use (I usually just use Original Auto-Linkies).
5. Click on the Generate Code button.
6. Follow the instructions provided.

That's it. It's really a very straight-forward program that is endlessly useful.

Comments

[Jordan (MamaBlogga)]

One issue with Mr Linky, however, is that these links aren't HTML links. They're JavaScript links. While blog visitors can click on them, there's no search engine incoming link benefit from those links.

Certainly, of course, WFMW couldn't function with having Shannon have to sift through and make all those links every week, and WFMW sends substantial traffic, so it's always worth participating. Just something to keep in mind when you're debating using a Mr Linky on a group writing project of some kind.

[Sheryl R]

I've tried following the directions on Mr. Linky's site to add the code to my template and individual post and Mr. Linky is not showing up...can you help me figure out exactly where I'm going wrong? I'm wondering if I'm going wrong by trying to add the header code into the CSS area?
Thanks in advance for any help...(I'm using Tyepad...and I'm very new to tyepad)

[Tammy L]

Jordan, you bring up a good point about the "value" of the links. The increased traffic might be worth the exchange of an html link to the carnival. :) And the link "value" on someone's blog would diminish substantially if they had a hundred html links in one post every week. So it's understandable why a blog owner wouldn't want the carnival links to be html. :)

That said, there is a way to retrieve the html of the Mr. Linky, with one click of a button. Just paste in the html rather than the link script, and you're all set. So anyone who does want the links to be included in search engines as part of their blog can quickly and easily do so. :) It's explained on the Mr. Linky website. :)

[Jordan (MamaBlogga)]

If you require all posts to link back to yours, I think it's almost rude to refuse to give real links back. Even if search engines discount links from pages with many links on them (which may or may not be the case), a low value link is better than no link at all.

The value of your outgoing links depends on a lot of other factors as well, including how many links are coming back to your blog. My day job is blogging in search engine optimization, so I can point out some excellent resources on the topic.

[Karen]

Are there programs like Mr. Linky out there besides Mr. Linky?