Is Link Love an Edorsement?

Every year at the end of the year I post a long list of link love. I do this to turn others on to some of my favorite bloggers and also to say "thank you" to loyal members of the Freelance Writing Jobs community who visit me daily. Beginning in November, I ask those who are interested to send me the details of their blogs and I’ll post them all in one end of the year link love fest. I can’t buy them all holiday gifts, but maybe I can give them the gift of traffic.

One member of my community disagreed with this practice and wondered if I was giving away the link love too cheap. After all, aren’t links endorsements? Shouldn’t endorsements be harder to come by? Yes and no. If I’m offering my regular weekly list of links, I look for items of interest to freelance writers and bloggers. Of course I’m not going to post links to places I wouldn’t visit or don’t believe in.

At that one day at the end of each year, it’s a different story. I post links to my favorite blogs PLUS links to blogs owned by members of my community. While I will visit each of these blogs to make sure there’s nothing offensive, it’s a different type of link love.

While I do think sometimes bloggers link blindly in order to up their page rank and backlinks and should be mindful about those with whom we associate, we can also take one day each year to thank the members of our community without being accused of selling out.

How else can you thank the thousands of people who visit you each day?