Do you allow posting links to articles on click sharing sites.I use some of these sites (cluckthru.com) for my blogs and I do get some 'real' traffic - this may be a way to get a wider audience to the site - however, my concern would be that the article in question would get an artificial number of views....

To be or not to be....that is totally illogical captain.....Spock.

http://personalopinionator.blogspot.com

Unfortunately, no. The reason is, some search engines prohibit link exchanging programs, and it would hurt our ranking in the search results. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

I think the best way users can bring in new visitors to the site is posting links to Papertank all over the web. Even if you think that the source won't bring in many visitors (such as a forum signature), it WILL increase our search engine rankings, and in turn bring in quality visitors who are searching specific keywords on our site.

This is a bit off-topic, but to expand on what Caleb just said about search engine rankings: Would it be practical (or even possible) to Google-bomb ourselves? If we all link to Papertank with the words "writing community" it might get Papertank a higher ranking for those specific keywords. (At least, I think that's how George Bush's biography got to #1 on Google for the phrase "miserable failure.")

Well, it would only be possible if we participated in it, such as a link exchanging scheme that would solely serve as a way to raise the page rank. That type of behavior is strictly prohibited by the Google Terms of Service.

However, if all of you were to link to us with similar keywords, that is perfectly fine. In fact, I believe Google encourages it, provided that the keywords are relevant to the site.