Aaron Wall hasn’t written extensively on WP blog security in the past, to my knowledge. However, he knows it’s a topic likely to be popular with the general blogger community and not too technical to push them away, while still being meaty and fresh enough to appeal to his regular SEO audience.
Hence, he wrote a feature-length blog post about WP blog security. And like yours truly, I’m sure many others will be linking to it.
Why? Why not link to other, more deserving wordpress blog security bloggers? Well, because Aaron’s bigger. Is that fair? No – others probably have written about it longer, more in depth, or better by a number of other metrics.
BUT!
But Aaron has my attention, and that of 1000s of others. I have no clue who the relevant security oriented bloggers might be besides I had to think about who the relevant pros were on the topic. People like Andy Beard, who’s been writing about WP blog security for ages. 5ubliminal is pretty savvy, though he might be more inclined to break into your site, afaik. Then there’s ha.ckers, a huge name in the web security field…
The point is that when you’re big and hold people’s attention on a day-to-day basis, it’s easy to either appropriate a idea – many fewer people know about Andy than do about Aaron – or else become strongly associated with it. If someone has to the choice between linking to the person who has their attention right now, vs thinking about who the best source on something is so as to link to them, guess who gets the link?
4/5 times, it’s Aaron over Andy. They’ll link to the person who has their attention. It’s easier. Usability’s “Don’t Make Me Think” principle applies to link building as well.
And notice that on a related note, ha.ckers gets a link because they have that distribution – again, because they’re big, not necessarily more savvy about WP-specific exploits.
Come to think of it, this is the same thing giving Wikipedia all those links. Well, to help you get off the Wikipedia crutch, here’s 100 sites to use instead of Wikipedia. And as Wiep suggested so intelligently, you’ll need to out-Wikipedia Wikipedia to outrank it, in many situations. Here’s a plugin for creating a table of contents at the top of your post, thus increasing usability, just like Wikipedia.
Of course, there’s other times that it pays to be small, as Seth Godin highlights. That relates more to your own thinking, however, rather than others’ thinking.
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