Notes After Cleaning Up My Friend Links Today

Recently, I bought a new domain, moegeek.com. It was only after migrating over that I realized a lot of my friend links couldn’t be transferred—the authors had already moved on to busy real lives. Reaching out to them for link updates yielded almost zero replies. On top of that, searching for the new domain brought up brands like MelGeek or MonsGeek, making it completely impossible to stand out. So, I reverted from the new domain back to my old one.

Of course, I discovered today that many blog owners had changed their domains and site names without me knowing, which set me off on a journey to track down these missing friend links.

Searching for Your Domain on GitHub

Searching for your own domain on GitHub is actually a quick way to locate scattered friend links. Since many people open-source their blog repositories, querying relevant keywords can help you rediscover several of them.

Searching Your Domain, Friend Domains, and Site Names on Search Engines

Directly searching search engines can sometimes uncover lost friend link domains. However, searching by name has its limitations if the site title is overly generic or contains highly competitive keywords. Cross-searching across four search engines—Yandex, Google, Bing, and Baidu—works best.

The Meaning of Friend Links

Personal blogs on the internet usually have a short lifespan, with most vanishing in under two years. Because of this, once a friend link is established, visiting it via the Internet Archive after it returns a 404 makes it feel as though the site is still alive. Another function is creating a web crawler network—for example, if you link to me and I link to a cluster of others, it boosts the odds of being indexed by search engines.

An Interlude

Having run websites for 3 years, I’ve encountered almost everything, but today was the first time I experienced “friendship first, link second” in reverse. I found it quite odd: I recalled him applying for a link exchange with me earlier, so I added him. After his domain changed, I recognized his avatar and site name, braved a 64 KB/s network connection, and waited 10 minutes for his site to load just to leave a comment, hoping we could keep the link exchange going. Only then did I realize that adding a friend link apparently meant having to leave frequent comments. But does commenting frequently make it genuine friendship, or does it mean commenting with a hidden agenda just for a link? In my view, the essence of friend links is turning something meaningless into something meaningful. The moment it requires payment or binds you to specific actions, its true flavor is lost.