A blogroll is a list of sites that a blogger lists, typically in the sidebar or footer of their blog. The idea behind this is to promote other blogs which the author sees as valuable to their readers. However, blogrolls tend to get used as a means of sharing link love between bloggers. i.e. if I put you in my blogroll will you add me?
I like to think I put a fair bit of consideration into SEO, and incoming links from other blogs are great. The two issues I have with blogrolls are:
- In terms of SEO incoming links are great, but outgoing links are not great. So having a list of 50 random blogs loading in the sidebar of every page of your blog is actually going to have negative implications on the SEO of your blog.
- If you have obviously only added a blog to your blogroll because another blogger has added you to theirs this is kind of silly. If the blog you are linking to has no connection to your blog topic, and in many cases you may not even know the blogger, what is the point. It sends a message to your readers that ultimately you are just trying to just maximum traffic, regardless of where it comes from, and it also adds clutter to your sidebar making the site less user friendly.
Now before I go into too much of a rant about this topic, I think their are plenty of sensible bloggers out there who use their blogroll sensibly. They only have a select list, and they are typically sites which the blogger respects, and are often with-in the same niche. If this is the case I think the use of a blogroll is great, it provides your readers with a service by giving them other blogs of value, and it sends the message that you actually care about your readers. Just some food for thought if your blogroll is longer than your average article, maybe you need a clean out?
6 Responses to “Blogrolls and SEO”
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I agree completely. A quality blogroll is one of the best things a blogger can offer. I’ve found many of my favorite blogs by checking out the blogrolls of bloggers I respect and enjoy reading. Still, I wonder how many is too many? It wouldn’t be hard to assemble a blogroll of 50+ quality blogs, but would that overwhelm the reader? How do you know where to draw the line?
What I intend to do on this site is to have a page dedicated to blogging links rather than a list in my sidebar. This way I am giving the blogs I like link love, adding a service for my readers, and not adding a long list of sites in my side bar which may be overwhelming and messy. Thanks for stopping by Brad.
“In terms of SEO incoming links are great, but outgoing links are not great.”
sorry man, but i don’t agree on this point
outgoing links can be great, if they are valuable.
Hi Stefano. It’s more of a Google page rank issue. To my knowledge outgoing links from your site are a negative factor in page rank calculation, so are to be avoided where unnecessary. I think relevant outgoing links anywhere on your site, such as a blog roll or referring to someone in a article can often bring in more links, so even in terms of page rank it can prove positive. But my intended point was to suggest that a lot of irrelevant outgoing links will not only annoy your readers, but may be bad for your page rank. However, like you say, a valuable link is always going to be a good thing. Thanks for your input. More reading on outgoing links: http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html#outbound_links
Hi Simon, yes, i agree with you about “a lot of irrelevant outgoing links”.
i don’t care too much about Pagerank. i even got incredible high ranking for competitive keywords thanks to outgoing links!
but an irrelevant outgoing link is a bad thing for users.
search engines want to offer good contents to their users, so they try to understand what users like.
do users like irrelevant outgoing links? unlikely.
do search engines like irrelevant outgoing links? unlikely.
Hi Simon, my blog is now set up with a separate page for blogging links–seems like a great way to go. Less clutter on the sidebar, and gives you an opportunity to display some description of what your blogroll blogs are all about. (That’s something I have to get around to doing!)