Stilettos and Trackbacks

Contrary to popular belief, blogrolls are not good. It might seem like a nice gesture to give props to your blog-buddies on your site, but you’re only hurting yourself where it really counts. Yes, building relationships is important to maintaining an image for yourself, but you really need to make your mark on the search engines.  And the search engines don’t like your blogroll.

First, let me explain what a blogroll is for those of you who don’t know. A blogroll is a list of other blogs and websites that you like and want to recommend to your readers. You list their sites as individual links that your readers can click on. It’s a sweet gesture, but not at the expense of getting your blog banned by Google.

I’m going to break this down for you in English, because I know all that tech-y geek talk can be confusing sometimes. We’ll use Google as the example, because they’re the biggest search engine anyway. Google doesn’t like excess links on your Home page. Your other pages don’t matter for this purpose. Just focus on the Home page. Check out your Home page now, and see how many links you think there are. If you’ve got nothing better to do, maybe you want to count them? I wouldn’t, but, “to each his own”, right?

Okay, now that we’ve looked at all the links on the Home page, I can explain what’s wrong with blogrolls. A blogroll is a list of links. Links are good, if you have less than 120 of them on your Home page. I actually recommend trying for around 100 links, just to be safe. Once you go above 120 links, Google essentially considers you spam. You don’t want to be spam, do you? I didn’t think so.  Aside from removing your blogroll, here are some other ways to reduce the amount of links on your Home page:

      – Use page breaks on each post, and limit the amount of links you use in the section that precedes the page break.

      – Don’t use links in your titles. I cannot believe how many people actually do this!

      – Minimize the links in your sidebars. You obviously need to have something in your sidebars, so put an Archives menu, a Popular Posts menu, and a list of Recent Posts. That should be sufficient to get your other posts noticed and keep you on Google’s good side.

Read Also: Does Your Blogroll Suck? 

Still feel like you need the blogroll? Well, how about this as an alternative: create a Links page on your blog. You can store the links to all your favorite sites there, and Google won’t penalize you for it. You could put 9 million links on that page if you want! I wouldn’t recommend it, though, because nobody is going to be THAT interested in checking out all the sites you recommend. RSS Pieces has a blogroll of sorts, under our Portfolio page. Luckily for us, all of our favorite sites are sites that we built!