About seven years ago, I came across my first Wiki. It was Ward Cunninghams C2 Wiki and I found it while looking up some information on Extreme Programming. It was a pretty nifty concept, pages of info that linked to other pages of info, all dynamically generated. I must have spent several hours that first day just travelling the links.

When I say to turn your blog into a wiki, I’m not talking about swapping Wordpress for MediaWiki. I’m suggesting that you interlink your content as much as possible.

People don’t just visit your blog for a single article, they visit your blog to read your content. They might find it while using a search engine, reading someone elses blog, or through scraped content, but once they’re in your blog, give them an incentive to stay. If you have lots of links, they’ll travel them.

This also gives you a defence against scraped content. Most scrapers are pretty lazy. They just want free content to get some search engine rankings. If you link to other articles in your site, you’ll not only be able to get a free linkback from the scraper, you’ll have an opportunity to get the reader back to your site.

In the case of scraper defence make sure your link is an absolute link. Wordpress allows you to enter just the slug part of the permalink, for example /living-free-online. This is a relative link and won’t generate a trackback. However, in a scraped article it won’t link back to your site, in all likelihood it will just end up directing to the 404 page of the scrapers blog. Your best bet is to use an absolute URL, for example http://livefreeandblog/living-free-online as your internal link.

Happy Linking.