The Truth (Blog-) Rolls Along: A Rising Tide Floats All Boats

So let's make it a Lutheran tide!

A companion blog recently joined Dr. Gene Edward Veith's Cranach discussion group. In visiting the site, you'll see what's a feature in many blogs — a list of other blogs. The discussion group talked about the genesis of the blog and its blogroll, including encouragement for confessional Lutheran blogges to promote each other's sites by means of blogrolls and "hat-tips," or links to references from fellow bloggers.

Some might desire for vanity's sake to be "numbered among the elect" of such a sterling group as we know orthodox Lutheran bloggers to be. Other poor souls affiliate with aggregators and blog carnivals only to increase exposure and feed their own egos. They may be incapable of logging on without checking to see if their standing in the ecosphere of The Truth Laid Bear has increased. These folk have problems with the Old Adam (and don't we all!).

However, I've also looked at statistics for referring traffic at various blogs with counters. You can check the following things for yourself, but be mindful that search engine placement is fluid, so what you see may differ from what I found a half hour ago.

I'll use just one example to illustrate. I clicked the eXTReMe Tracking button for Ask the Pastor and went to the Referer Tracking 1 page, which shows the 20 most recent referrers, the 20 most recent search engine queries, and the like.

One of the search strings came through Yahoo search for bible adam sons. When I checked, the first hit was for "Ask the Pastor: The Wives of Adam's Sons" while the second pointed to "If We Are All Sons of Adam" from the Stormfront White Nationalist Community. To which would you want an inquiring soul to turn?

I bring this up because, while search engines use often complex formulas, the number of sites (and blog posts) linking to another site heavily influences which posts come out on top. Now consider that Yahoo says this search returned "Results 1 - 10 of about 2,410,000 for bible adam sons." Poke around at some of the other links over the next few pages and you'll discover such wonders as Serpent Seed Doctrine (currently ranked #20) and "Cain and Abel, the Biblical Story" (ranked #33). The first is another white supremicist, Christian Identity cult site while the second begins by saying, "Cain and Abel are types of men. These are not historical figures but their story is our story."

The way I look at it, confessional Lutheran bloggers should do what we can to keep the truth near the top of the search engines, burying racism, evolutionary biology, and other false doctrines and philosophies of men as deeply as possible. So I encourage you to blogroll all the orthodox Lutheran blogs you regularly read, then consider expanding your blogroll to others you know are edifying, even if they're not on your regular menu. Even if a person never visits this blog, one of my links may have gotten another's site listed high enough on a search engine that someone may have found what was otherwise lost.

Then, if a specific post grabs you, especially enough to elicit a comment, consider also posting about it on your own blog and setting a link back to it; after all, don't you want to share all good things? If you write regularly about religion, science, life issues, your own vocation, or other matters of interest, consider your musings' appropriateness for the Lutheran Carnival. Also think about nominating others' posts, as Carnival hosts may allow.

Depending upon your industriousness and comfort level with associating with the organizations, consider blog aggregators, including Pro-life Blogs, the Blogdom of God, and the Evangelical Aggregator; set up blog accounts with Technorati; publicize your blog at Blurt It; join TTLB's ecosystem; and, as you like, add yourself to some of the directories you'll find among the blog buttons in the right-hand column or on the blogs of others.

You may be clueless about being a Lutheran pastor's wife, but your links may help others find one or another who's been given that vocation. You can promote Lutheran bloggers who possess wide-ranging interests or who've established themselves in arcane specialties. Let others meet a deaconess teaching classical education, a Brit who shares our Lutheran Confessions, a geologist with ideas about (not) rebuilding New Orleans, or a pastor who likes to answer questions.

Whatever floats your boat....  ¶ 11:25 |