The SOHO Quest: Just What Are Archives and How Important Are They to Your Blog?

(Archived in: Related Miscellany Weblogs and Business)

"Archives", or archiving for most blog platforms is something that for the most part happens automatically in the background with no action or "command" necessary for it to take effect. This is similar to auto-save. New bloggers can simply read about it when starting a new blog, set up their archive preferences...and then forget it.

First let's look at the concept of a "blog archive". As you might expect, it simply means a system to file or store blog posts for future reference. Since blogs were first written and intended to be more or less online personal journals, blog posts naturally were first archived in a reverse chronological order.

This makes some sense, as anyone reading your blog for the first time would probably want to read the current or most recent post. This submission would then be auto-archived by first the day, then the week, and then the month, and eventually the year.

Most blogging platforms display the archives in a sidebar, with some ability for you to control how the archives are listed, and how these lists are displayed to readers.

Anyone that has been blogging for any length of time, probably refers to their archives on a regular basis without thinking much about it. This comes in handy when you are linking to a past post as an update, for reference to create deep linking for SEO purposes, or as a continuation of a series for a particular subject of your blogging niche.

The beauty of blog archives is that you really don't have to think about them once you set up your preferences, but they are always there. This is not much different than the concept of doing automatic backups of your important computer files for permanent media storage.

It is easy to just think of a blog archive as a record of your blog posts for long-term or permanent storage for future reference. For a fairly complete glossary of current blogging terms visit The Giant Blogging Terms Glossary. "Archives" is listed there under the subhead of "Blog Components and Functions".

This post is part of a Link and Blog Dot Com project to list 40 common blog terms as defined by bloggers in their own words. That list is still being posted and updated at this link for L&B Glossary.