Link roundups and blog carnivals

By Bill Hartzer · Hartzer Consulting · 25+ years in search, domains and expert witness work

What roundups and carnivals are

A link roundup is a recurring post in which somebody collects the best things published in their field over the last week or month and links to each one with a sentence of comment. The formats are familiar: this week in [field], Friday reading, the best of the month, a curated newsletter with an archive on the web. The publisher's whole job is finding things to link to, which makes them the rare prospect who benefits from hearing about your article.

A blog carnival was the same idea with a rotating host. Bloggers in a niche took turns hosting an edition; anyone could submit a post through a central submission system; the host chose entries, wrote a short editorial framing, and published the collection with links to every included post. The next edition moved to a different blog. The format was a genuine institution of the 2000s blogosphere, with regular editions in personal finance, education, medicine, law and small business.

Carnivals are effectively extinct, and I cover them here because the term still appears in link building material written a decade ago and readers deserve to know it is historical rather than something they have failed to find. The central submission service that coordinated them stopped operating years ago. The infrastructure they depended on — heavy RSS use, trackbacks, a dense network of independent blogs that read each other — is gone.

The grade is situational because the tactic is entirely safe and entirely dependent on whether your field still has roundups in it. In some niches there are a dozen. In others there are none.

How it works, step by step

This is a prospecting problem far more than a persuasion problem. Finding the roundups is nine-tenths of the work.

1. Find them with search operators. The format is repetitive, which makes it findable. Patterns that work:
   • "your topic" intitle:"link roundup"
   • "your topic" "weekly roundup" OR "monthly roundup"
   • "your topic" "this week in" inurl:blog
   • "your topic" "best of the week" OR "weekend reading"
   • "your topic" inurl:roundup
   • "your topic" "what we're reading"
   Restrict by date to the last year. A roundup that stopped in 2019 is not a prospect.
2. Check that it is live and still linking. Two things to verify: an edition in the last month or two, and outbound links that are followed rather than stripped. Both fail more often than you expect.
3. Read three back editions. Learn what gets included. Most roundups have a clear preference — original research, opinion pieces, tutorials, news — and pitching against it wastes the one contact you get.
4. Publish something that fits. This is the step people skip. Roundups link to things worth reading. You need the thing first.
5. Submit the way they ask. Many roundup publishers state a submission method: a form, a tagged email, a mention on social. Following it costs nothing and skipping it is why the polite ones ignore you.
6. Keep the message to four lines. The URL, one sentence on what it covers, one sentence on why their readers would care, and nothing else. No pitch, no attachment, no follow-up sequence.

What it costs in time and effort

Per link, this is among the cheapest legitimate tactics there is. The message takes two minutes. There is no relationship to build, no asset to create beyond the article you were publishing anyway, and no negotiation.

The cost sits in two other places. The first is prospecting: assembling a list of live roundups in your niche takes a solid afternoon of operator searches and manual verification, and it is not reusable across clients in different fields. The second is content supply. A roundup will include you once and then expects a reason to include you again; the tactic converts a steady publishing habit into links and does nothing for a site that publishes twice a year.

Maintenance is the underrated cost. Roundup lists rot quickly because the publications themselves stop. Expect to re-verify the list every few months and to find that a third of it has gone quiet.

When it works and when it does not

It works in fields that still have an active independent publishing culture. Software development, cybersecurity, marketing, law, medicine, education, personal finance, and most academic-adjacent areas all still carry weekly link collections. It works especially well for original research, tools, and strongly argued opinion pieces, because those are what curators are short of.

It does not work in fields where nobody blogs any more. Many consumer and local sectors have no roundups at all, and no amount of operator searching will conjure them. Running a null result here is normal and is itself a useful finding.

The important structural change is that the format migrated to email. The strongest curators in most fields now run newsletters, and a newsletter link is not a link. Some newsletters publish a web archive that is crawlable and followed, which restores the value; many do not, and some route every link through a tracking redirect that strips it entirely. Check the archive before you count a newsletter as a link prospect, and be honest with a client that an inclusion in a well-read newsletter may deliver readers and no link at all. That is often the better outcome, but it is a different outcome.

Carnivals do not work because they no longer exist. If you find something calling itself a blog carnival today, it is almost always an automated submission site recycling the name to sell listings — the same business as an article directory with a nostalgic label.

Common mistakes

• Submitting a commercial page. Roundups link to articles, research and tools. A product page submission marks you as someone who has not read the thing they are pitching to.
• Pitching every week. One good submission a month, at most. Curators remember the people who flood them, and not fondly.
• Not checking whether links are followed. Some roundups nofollow everything as policy. Worth knowing before you build a list around them.
• Ignoring the stated submission process. If there is a form, use the form.
• Writing a pitch instead of a submission. This is not persuasion. It is supplying a curator with a candidate. Four lines.
• Chasing dead formats. Time spent looking for live blog carnivals is time wasted, and the sites still advertising them are selling something else.
• Assuming a newsletter inclusion is a link. Check for a crawlable archive first.
• Never reciprocating attention. Reading and sharing a curator's work before you submit is not a trick, it is how you become a name they recognize.

A worked example

Take a firm publishing analysis on industrial supply chains. They want to know whether roundups are worth any time at all in that field.

An afternoon of operator searches — "supply chain" intitle:"roundup", "supply chain" "this week in", "logistics" "weekend reading", plus variants for freight, procurement and shipping — returns 41 candidates. Verification cuts hard. Nineteen have not published in over a year. Six are newsletters with no web archive. Three nofollow all outbound links. Two are aggregators with no human curation. That leaves eleven live roundups, of which four are the ones with real readership.

The firm publishes a piece of original analysis on port dwell times using data it collected itself. They submit it to all eleven, four lines each, following whatever process each states.

Three include it within a fortnight. A fourth includes it a month later, having found it through one of the first three. One replies asking whether the underlying data can be cited in a separate piece, which turns into a better link than any of the roundups. Six never respond.

Four links plus one citation from an afternoon of prospecting and eleven short emails. The catch is visible in the numbers: the eleven-name list is now used up for a month, and it is the only list that field has.

How to measure it

Measure the prospect list as carefully as the links, because the list is the asset.

• Live roundups found per niche. Record it. It tells you immediately whether this tactic deserves any further time, and a null result saves you weeks.
• Inclusion rate per submission. Should be high — a fifth to a third is normal for a well-matched submission. If it is near zero, the problem is your content, not your pitch, because nothing else in the message can be wrong.
• Followed versus nofollowed inclusions. Track separately. Many roundups nofollow, and a report that mixes them overstates the result.
• Referral traffic per inclusion. Usually modest, occasionally the best traffic day of the month if the roundup is a large one.
• Downstream pickup. Roundups are read by other curators, and an inclusion in a well-regarded one often produces links you never asked for. Watch new referring domains in the fortnight after each inclusion.
• List decay. Re-verify quarterly and record how many have gone quiet. In my experience this is the fastest-decaying prospect list in link building.

The verdict

Worth doing, in a shrinking number of fields, at very low cost. If your niche still has half a dozen live roundups, they are among the easiest legitimate links available, and the ask is honest: a curator whose job is finding things to link to, and you have published something worth linking to. Nothing about it is a scheme.

Two things keep it from a higher grade. The format is contracting, and much of what survives has moved into email where the link does not exist. And the prospect pool in any given niche is small enough to exhaust in a month, which makes it a supplement rather than a program.

Blog carnivals are history. If you are reading an older guide that recommends them, that is a good signal about the age of everything else in it.