It seems like an obvious statement, but communities are built with links. Digg has 252 links on its front page. YouTube has 197. Frank's blog currently has 189. These sites get lots of traffic based on the fact that they build a community around them, sort of like "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours", except with web traffic.

Google and other search engines love this too, clearly if you are linked then you must be important? The PageRank technology thinks so, and Google is built on the back of PageRank so clearly it must be a pretty solid technique.

What about linking in real life? Well the networking of human viruses occurs in much the same way as computer viruses, that was established back in 2002.

Funnily enough some people think it can also explain the Paris Hilton phenomenem. This blog post discusses how Paris is really the Queen of Links when it comes to product placement and promotion. She mentions a corporation and they throw the spotlight on to her and shower her with gifts. She is essentially hiring herself as their cover girl. As with internet links the whole situation is self-perpetuating once it reaches the mainstream. More corporations try and link to her, and their promotion of her gets her noticed by other corporations and people.

There are plenty of things that webmasters can learn from her success (other than making a sex tape is a good launching platform):

• Post content which gets you linked on high traffic sites
• Link to as many relevant locations as possible (search engines do check for relevance)
• Talk about other people and they will talk about you behind your back... :-)

Oh and why not link to my blog as well? I do practice what I preach! :-)