Encouraging Small Website Discoverability
What’s going on, Internet? Marginalia wrote about the small website discoverability crisis back in 2021 and it still holds up. The problem is simple: there are loads of great small websites out there and they’re nearly impossible to find. Google won’t surface them. Reddit won’t either. You basically have to stumble onto them — through web directories, link blogs, or search engines that actually care about the small web.
Their proposed solution is federated bookmarking. Personal websites should have a links page pointing to other personal websites, and those links pages should link to other links pages, creating a loose network of discovery. Which ties into something I wrote about in The Art of Hyperlinking, don’t just link, explain why. Give people a reason to click through.
The thing that caught me off guard was finding my own links page listed on Marginalia’s bookmarks. Didn’t expect that. Makes the whole concept feel real when you end up in someone else’s list.
If you’ve got a links page, link to someone else’s. That’s basically it.
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