Web Business Marketing Blog

According to Wikipedia, a blogroll is

a collection of links to other weblogs.^[1] When present, blogrolls are often found on the front page sidebar of most weblogs.^[2]

Some bloggers have very long blogrolls, listing every blog they can find on their subject & related. Others are more selective.

To decide the length of our blogroll, you need to consider why you have it in the first place.

For example, you may believe that reciprocal links work to direct traffic to your site, and optimise it at the same time for the search engines. Think again. Traffic that gets directed to your site from a long blogroll somewhere else is minute if not zero (just work out the math). As for SEO, being linked to many sites may improve your ranking, but as Garry Conn points out, a deluge of weblinks confuses the Google Bot, sending it off to other sites rather than indexing yours.

Also branding considerations kick in. Every link you put in your roll is your personal recommendation to your readers. Each link therefore also carries the risk of disappointing them.

So here’s my take on blogrolls:

1. Be selective, very selective. Adding a link to your roll is an event.
2. Links do not need to be reciprocal. It’s not because you’re readers might like another blog, that it works the other way.
3. If you do link to another blog, have a deeper relation of some kind with the other blog. Build highways rather than life-support lines.
4. If you’re too polite to say no to invitations for link exchange, put them on a subsidiary page as a sandpit blogroll.

An idea, and exception to the above is when you want to offer readers a reference list of specialised blogs on a subject, such as for example Marketo’s Big List of B2B Marketing Blogs. In this case, put it on a subsidiary page, keep it regularly updated, and then post about it.

Anybody game for writing a case for long blogrolls?