People are posting the whole list to their blogs and I don’t see it as any kind of love, but an underhanded spam tactic. All 800 or so bloggers then get a track back in their post which in turn links back to this ‘link-loving’ bloggers.

Thanks again for hosting such a fun event. I definitely look forward to participating in future projects.

Your GWP events gave my original Family Travel blog a real boost last year, so thank you for that.

Now that I write for several blogs, I decided to put my Top Five post on the newest one, the Perceptive Travel Blog, which is just starting and tends to the quirky (in other words, might not be discovered on its own for awhile.)

The traffic and linking was crazy, but a good sort of crazy. I found great blogs and they found us (and I know a lot of people are now ProBlogger and Perceptive Travel converts.) To heck with stats on your Google ranking and the minor distraction of such a project from your main mission — the GWP puts you on the map in a huge way.

It also lets people read your stuff and get to know you and your incredibly generous and helpful attitude. That’s worth a gazillion Googly bits of data any day. :)

From what I have seen on many blogs, there is a huge difference in the traffic for participants and links for those taking part on the first day.

Most of the links I received were from people publishing all 800+ links rather than a day 4 list.

I took part mainly because I was writing the post anyway, so submitting it took an additional 5 minutes.

I wouldn’t worry about the SEO effect, as you use “more” on the posts thus only the specific permalink has a leak, and most of the incoming links would be to the project page itself.

1. No barriers to entry. The top 5 theme, with no other restrictions or hoops to jump through, made it easily accessible to ANY blog writer. I couldn’t think of an excuse not to enter, though I tried!

2. Everybody was in with an equal chance due to the winner being chosen at random rather than judged on the merits of their blog posts. If the prize had gone to the entry judged the best, it may have discouraged many still-developing writers like me from entering, knowing the high standards we would be competing against. By picking a winner at random, it was participation, not brilliance, that was being rewarded with the chance of a prize. We may not all be brilliant writers yet, but we can ALL participate (and in doing so we get better).

Kudos to the winner!

I can’t thank you enough, for hosting the Group Writing Project. It was mutually beneficial, I can see, and I hope you plan on hosting another one in the future. Thank you for all your hard work, and the traffic to my blog :) .

Best Regards,

Brennan Monaco
http://bpmonaco.com/

But it sure was fun and a very good learning experience.

I wonder whether your incomng link amount was the cause of you losing on Pagerank (from 7 to 6) ? Did you see any traffic change due to this ?

Thanks,

LV