Everybody and their brother has a blogroll. So, it must be OK, right? Wrong. Blogrolls are nothing more than glorified link farms and that is exactly what Google sees them as. There are documented cases of Google penalizing sites for both having a blogroll and getting blogrolled on other sites, so steer clear of this pop blog phenomenon.  Want to find out why blogrolls suck and how your real estate blog can do to link to your trusted sources without blogrolling them?  Read on.

Shout out to SEOmoz’ explanation of the affect blogrolling has on getting sandboxed: Google Sandbox and the blogroll. Below is my favorite excerpt on the subject:

“Build Natural Links & Avoid Getting Blogrolled - One of the most common elements suspected for sandboxing completely "natural" sites is their addition to blogrolls. These links are sitewides on URLs that frequently have many thousands of pages in Google's index and it appears on the surface that they can cause the link problems that lead to sandboxing. The best way to avoid this is to watch your logs for referring URLs and request to be removed from any blogrolls that are sent to you. With some luck, the sympathetic blogger will understand and remove you. It seems ridiculous to have to go to these extents to avoid sandboxing, but in the commercial reality of the web, it may, in fact, help you in both the short and long run.”

What is a blogroll?

According to Wikipedia, a Blogroll is a collection of links to other weblogs. When present, blogrolls are often found on the front page sidebar of most weblogs.

Blogrolls have recently come under scrutiny by the SEO community and with good reason. And personally, I think they are dead weight for any blog and yet, it seems that every blog and their brother has one.  

Read also: Moving beyond the blogroll

5 reasons blogrolls suck

1. They are nothing but glorified link farms which as we all know, search engines hate.

Once you start making lists of links and placing it on your blog, you run the risk of being categorized as a link farm. If you absolutely must place a link farm, I mean, blogroll on your site, put it on an inner page and never, ever in the side bar of each and every blog page. Also, if you have a new site, wait at least 3 months until you are firmly out of the Sandbox before starting a blogroll. Don’t give Google the ammo it needs to dampen your search results any further.

Read also: The Google sandbox Explained

2. Blogrolls can bloat a page past the critical link mass that Google determines to be 120 links. 

Once your home page bloats past 120 links Google will stop crawling new internal links and drop some of your pages of from it’s index. That is a documented behavior of Google. Now, 120 links in a blogroll sounds excessive, but let’s say you have a bunch of buttons and links in articles on your home page (around 50-75 is common for a blog). You need to subtract all those links from the critical mass of 120 to figure out how large your blogroll can grow to before you get dropped. Do you really want to keep track of all the links on your home page to make sure your blogroll doesn’t inadvertently cause the entire thing to get dropped? Probably not.

Read also:  Too many outbound links will get you dropped from Google

3. While they do provide backlinks to other sites, they do not drive quality traffic.

Very few readers actually look at or care about your blogroll. The only people who care are the ones on it or the ones that want to be on it because they think it will provide them with a much needed backlink. 

Fact is, if a blogroll is on each page of your site, it gives the blogrolled site a staggering amount of links from a single source which Google considers suspicious. 

Also, because blogrolls only use the site name as the anchor text in the link, those links are actually weighted less heavily than a single quality link within an article that has valuable anchor text.

Read also: Using links to generate traffic and retain visitors

4. Who are you really placing on your blogroll?

From what I see of blogrolls in real estate – they are just popularity contests… long lists of people that you know that also have blogs or people who have requested that their blog be added to your roll. In theory, blogrolls are meant to have only a select number of high quality resource links. 

If you have a blogroll, prune it. Look at the links, only include blogs that have real quality content your readers will be interested in and make sure the blogs you are linking to have at least a PR3 or above. Nix anything with a PR 0-2. If you want to be super discriminating, nix anything with less than a PR5. 

Do not be a blogroll whore rolling any real estate blog with a pulse. You do that and you will get branded with the search engine equivalent of a scarlet letter.

Read also: Ultimate guide to building backlinks

5. They are a pain in the butt to keep updated

This was my primary reason for not using a blogroll on RSS Pieces site. The stress of keeping the thing up to date and the uncomfortable experience of having to tell someone you won’t blogroll their site when they ask just made a blogroll unappealing to me.   When I find sites I like, I mention them in articles. It helps me share my link love and increases the likelihood of my readers clicking through to the site which is what is most valuable… traffic. 

How to share your link love of another site without using a blogroll

Instead of blogrolling your trusted sources or associates link to those sites naturally in articles that directly relate to the topics on their sites. This way you provide quality backlinks to your resources and ensure more click throughs to those sites.

Recommendation to those of you with blogrolls

If you have a blogroll, nix it. 

If you are dead set on keeping it, confine it to one single page on your blog and only display a select few of the blogrolled sites on your homepage (no more than 10).  

If you are a new site and want a blogroll, wait 3 months before adding it to avoid further Sandboxing.

Related Posts