As Google continues to role out updates and changes to their algorithm, including big penalties for over optimization and links from massive “private” blog networks such as Build My Rank (see Build My Rank Is Dead), many webmasters and SEOers have been flustered trying to find reliable link building practices and techniques which will both work and which will not get them penalized now and in the future.

Let’s talk about blog carnivals as another link opportunity which you might consider.

What Is a Blog Carnival

Admittedly I’m not a fan of the phrase “blog carnival” because it doesn’t especially give any insight as to what it is if you’re not familiar with it. A blog carnival is a group of posts which revolve around a given topic and which are written and contributed to by a revolving set of authors.

The “carnival” in blog carnival refers to the traveling nature of them as in how a carnival picks up and moves to the next city.

The carnival generally has a moderator who starts it up in the first place and pursues different bloggers to write content and host the blog on their sites. That content is posted to a given webmaster’s site and it includes links to other posts written by other bloggers on their blogs.

You can think of a blog carnival as somewhere in between guest blogging and an ad swap. Whenever you host a blog carnival post on your site, you benefit from the traffic which other webmasters who have or will partake in that carnival will send your way from their sites. Conversely, as part of the deal, you will include links to other posts on similar topics which other webmasters who have partaken in the carnival have contributed.

Again this is generally all moderated by the organizer of the blog carnival who consults with each member of the carnival in terms of what they will be contributing content wise and to ensure that they include links to the other bloggers. This can also be done by all of the members of the carnival collectively.

The more people involved in the carnival, the more content and obviously the more linking which will go around. This is why it helps to have a moderator to make sure that the linking structure doesn’t get out of hand and stays natural.