January 11th, 2009
Why I Don’t Like Blogrolls
When setting up this blog I made the decision not to include a blogroll on the sidebar. I have had blogrolls on previous blogs of mine but I found that they always did more harm than good. Not SEO wise but relationship wise. It’s a weird thing but people take offense to you not linking back to them if they include you on their blogroll.
Now some would say, let them take offense – who cares anyway. But for me, when someone adds me to their blogroll I almost feel obliged to link back to them. Almost as a thank you. By doing this, the blogroll ends up being pages and pages long and it actually becomes worthless.
So is there an alternative to having a blogroll? Well, I have thought about it and there are two things you can add to your blog, at least one of which I plan on implementing on this blog pretty soon.
The first (which I am still not 100% sold on) is having a sidebar item which aggregates via RSS feed all the latest blog posts from your blogroll blogs, but only displays the latest 5 posts. So you can have it set to pull from 1000 feeds, but only the 5 latest posts will display on your sidebar. Thus the content in this block is constantly changing and your users get quick and easy access to posts that they might like from your “blogroll”.
The second idea which I like a lot more, is having a “Top Commenters” block on your sidebar. Thus the people who enjoy reading your blog and comment often get credited with a link back to their homepage in your sidebar. This also encourages participation via comments. There may be a downside to this though in that people start writing short and silly comments just to get a link back.
What I would do for the second idea is setup some cases in my query where firstly, it only looks at commenters in the past month. Secondly, the comments must have at least 100 characters to be given any weight. Thirdly I would give the commenters the option to leave their name and then also the name of their website or keywords they are targeting. In the comments list it will display their name and on the sidebar their keywords or website name.
I think I will look at implementing at least one of these two ideas next month. Heck, I may even do both.
Yeah, and sometimes it just clutters thing up too much, like I see on so many blogs anymore, too much clutter, see ya…