Only narrowly did I advert a major mistake in facts when I started a blogging rant against Alltop in an entry never to be published. The trigger for the rant was a notice from fairshare that Alltop was not linking back to my web site even though they were using one of my entries. This is why fact checking was so important, and why you need to spend the time doing this every day.

The trigger of the rant was an entry in my fairshare account that said Alltop was not linking back to me.

The problem with this is that fairshare only looks for the original blog entry, and since I guest post over on Cloud Avenue fairshare would have looked for the link from Alltop to techwag, not Alltop to cloudave. Fairshare was doing the right job, but after seeing many links from Alltop that never went back to the original blog I was getting annoyed, the link economy is important and Alltop is a generally respected aggregation site. After composing a wonderfully ripping blog entry into the process of breaking the link economy I started hunting down links, to find out that Alltop was taking the link from Alltop to Cloudave, they were catching the syndicated article and not the original on techwag.

This is why fact checking is so very important for a blogger. If I had posted the original article as planned I would have made a huge mistake because of information from Fairshare that did not necessarily reflect reality. This is a problem with syndication, this is a problem of the many places where the things I write end up on the internet, but not a problem with Alltop. If I had not fact checked, I would have come across as a real idiot who just got something very wrong. If I had posted it, Google is forever, and my reputation would have been damaged.

I am glad I fact checked this article in particular, and simply sinks home the idea that you must always fact check what you are writing. Some bloggers can get away without fact checking because they do not care about their reputation, but if you do care about your reputation online, then fact checking is going to be something you do for every article. It might add 30 to 60 minutes per article to do this, but it is worth the effort. You might find the article you were writing was way off base, and not an accurate portrayal of what is really happening.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Is your business blog still relevant? (socialmediatoday.com)