What Effect Does a Blogroll Have on Your Blog?
When I come across an interesting blog and I know I will visit it again… I like to snoop around, find out more about the author and look for tips that I can use on my own blog. Now this blog I came across today had an interesting angle to its two-column structure.
The author has done away with the Blogroll and introduced a separate page that holds all the outbound links from his site! I know how technology changes and to what extent webmasters can go in order to improve their PageRank. However, to do away with a Blogroll like it was something from the 90s appeared a little strange and at the same time indicated to a clever SEO trick to me so I had to investigate and here’s what I found out:
The Problem
If you link to a website, you are in effect extending your PageRank to it (now you know why people pay hundreds of dollars to have their link placed on a high PR webpage) since one of Google’s basis for determining the PageRank is links. Consider this, if you have 10 links in your Blogroll (which is present on every page by default) and 50 pages on your blog, you will be extending 10*50 PageRank worth of juice and to match that you’ll have to constantly link back to internal pages. Now, if you had a 100 links in your Blogroll you wouldn’t be able to balance it off.
So the question you probably on your mind at this point is, Should I get rid of the Blogroll?
The Solution
Yes, that’s one way to go about it but you can keep a Blogroll on your main page and remove it from all the internal pages. By removing the Blogroll from all internal pages, your blog will benefit at both SEO and PR. Now, even if you have 200 links in your Blogroll you will only have 200 external links. Another way is to add the nofollow tag to your external links. For those who are using WordPress you can either use this tip by Justin Cook or try this plug-in to add “nofollow” in rel attributes.
