The Carnival of the Feminists is up at I See Invisible People | Carnival of Feminists XIII [1]. Lorraine submitted her article, I am failing my race [2].

First off, I think carnivals are a great way to condense every months what's happening around the different blogospheres that are popping like corn all over the web. But by the way they have been developed, I have never felt they actually are that effective after the carnival is done.

Here's my reasons why :

1. Since each carnival is held at a different blog, there is a problem with the indexing of this information within the search engines.

   For example, take a look at this search. Since culturekitchen's search engine ranking is higher than most feminist blogs, it ranks 3rd on the list [3]; eventhough we have never held a carnival on this blog. We just announced it.

   If I go one step further and set limits on the search (by putting the phrase inside quotation marks), you still do not get a proper list of search results [4]. CultureKitchen is 4th now on the list.

2. One of the main reasons for the indexing problem is the lack of consistent best practices by carnival hosts.

   I have noticed now that most carnival hosts do not use categories (or taxonomies, for the librarians in the crowd), or keywords to identify all the important topics under which the links appearing in the carnival should be indexed. This is a huge, and I mean A HUGE omission.

   I will be explaining on another post why tags, taxonomies and keywords are important tools for political creatives online. The short of it is this : You need to help the search engines find your information. The more you help them, the faster search engines will find you. Make it part not just of your blogging habit but of your political practice.

3. My main question is, do these carnivals really increase traffic for the smaller blogs that do most of the hosting? I am going to take a gander that it only happens for the month of the hosting and then traffic peters off.

   The explanation for this is simple. For inconnues, traffic is generated several ways on the web.

   1. You tell your friends and family to read your blog.
   2. You advertise your blog through business cards, email footers, resumes, or any other personal communications.
   3. You are blogrolled and word-of-mouthed.
   4. You get quoted in posts by other bloggers.
   5. As more search engines mine your blog you get higher search engine ranking and more stumble-upon traffic.
   6. You get bookmarked in services like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit.
   7. You appear in carnivals on a regular basis.
   8. You advertise using BlogAds or Adsense for at least a quarter (3 months).

   Google actually is the largest traffic referrer to a lot of blogs out there. It's just by it's shear size and ubiquity as a search engine that people should take heed about what Google does to web traffic and blogs. If most blogs participating in these carnivals do not have a robust combination of these elements, the carnivals serve well the people immediately but have very weak lasting effects. What happen with the traffic is more akin to blog tourism. You check it out once, maybe twice, then you move on.

   Which is why everybody should take heed of the next point:

4. Cross-bound linking should be the #1 priority of a blog carnival.

   Out-bound linking is what happens when the carnival host culls lovingly all the links to articles. In-bound linking is what happens when all the participants and miscellaneous audiences excitedly link to the host.

   From the point of view of a carnival host with a blog that does not get a lot of traffic, the carnival sounds like a swell idea. From the POV of the linked bloggers, this sounds great because more people will read at least that one article. They submitted. But then, happens when everybody moves to the next carnival host? You have to start all over again.

   Cross-bound linking is what happens when bloggers blog each other and link to each other. Blog software was develop to not only facilitate this but to indicate that a conversation was happening on line.

   Search engine ranking algorythms have been developed with this in mind : The more links a page has, it signifies authority on the web. Links on a blogroll are fine and dandy, but links coming from a post have more weight in ranking the authority of a blogger than blogrolls. The smart people at Technorati know this [5] and that's why they have a new feature that filters blogs by their authority.

All of this to come to my main point of contention :

Blog carnivals could be building more than just monthly visibility. They could be building search engine authority by having all participants publishing the carnival post. And by pushing the blogs higher up on search engine hits, you will be building a steady flow of traffic as well..

Think about it. You've gone from only one link to your blog post to having 10-15-40 links iterated through the other participants blogs. This will immediately alert searchbots that something important is happening among these blogs. Which will mean that all the sites will be hit by them more often from then on, increasing the visibility of all of them through the likes of Yahoo! and Google. This in turn will increase your stumble upon traffic. Meaning then that traffic will not be the hit-and-run thing of blog tourism but a phenomenon that will increase over time.

This is why all the blogs involved ought to have their posts marked with as many tags, keywords and/or categories as possible. They also should have categories for the carnivals they participate in. Just look at the list of categories we have added to this blog post. And then there is the category orgy put up by Lorraine [6]. These are fundamentally important not just for the internal indexing of your blogs. Categories are a good way for your stumble-upon audience to know what your blog is all about. And of course, the #1 audience members you should always take about, searchbots, will love you for it as well.

Even better. Traffic to the host will not be lost if non-participants still link to the host's blog. It means though that a bit more of effort has to be made to send out communications about these carnivals. It means that the carnival organizers ought to start mailing lists to announce them every month and make it possible for new audiences to automatically sign-up for alters.

It also means that a link to an RSS aggregating all the hosts should be made readily available on all carnival posts as well as on aggregating services like Feedster, Feedburner, Bloglines, MyYahoo!, Google Reader, etc.

One more consideration to make? Buy the domain name to your carnival. I cannot stress how incredibly important this is. If someone else has bought the domain, they are making money out of it this very moment and will be sucking all the effort you are putting into promoting your slice of the web by diverting stumble upon traffic to their squatter site. And believe me, even though they are infringing on your trademark and copyright, the truth is, it takes money to fight these leeches.

The New York Times bought Abou.com for $410 million a year ago [7]. Since then, they've been turning The Grey Lady into a blog. Why? Because there is money to be made by having good search engine optimization [8]. 90% of About.com's traffic is "stumble upon". People don't go their portal anymore. Most get through to them using Google.

So, as I am ready to take my hat off as a web strategist and consultant, my last word on this is: take a cue out of the big players. Why? If you have not noticed recently, About.com spends an awful lot of time now quoting and linking to articles in the New York Times.

Just saying.

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