Though I’ve written this article focused on professional networking sites like LinkedIn, it’s exactly the same set of questions you need to consider when you’re thinking about how many sites to include in your blogroll or exchange links with. Read on, you’ll see what I mean…

One of the discussions I’ve been watching with great interest in the greater LinkedIn community and with professional networking sites in general is whether it’s a better strategy to have a small number of quality connections, or a large number of relevant but varied connections.

This discussion is so common, in fact, that some people have started to abbreviate it as QvQ.

But what are the pros and cons of each strategy? Let’s have a look…

First off, like much else in life, the connect / don’t connect decision is one that you have to consider anew for each potential professional connection, regardless of your individual connection criteria. Specifically, even if you decided that you’d only link to very high quality people (that is, people who you have know for at least X years, or worked with on at least Y projects) you’re still placing yourself on a continuum of networking connection restrictions where one extreme is that you won’t connect to anyone and the diametric opposite extreme is that you’ll connect to everyone, their Mom and their dog.

Clearly both of those are pointless strategies, the former because you quite literally don’t have a network at all if you only have a single node, you. It’s the “no man is an island” revisited for the digital age. The latter strategy doesn’t work either because if you have no method of screening potential contacts then you might as well pick up a phone book or randomly dial your telephone hoping to make a good connection.

To understand the relative value of different points on the continuum, then, I think it’s important to understand why you’re networking in the first place…