How Does a Blogroll Harm Your Blog?
A blogroll is an integral part of every blog. In fact, when a blogroll isn’t present, it’s like a blog isn’t complete. Did you know, however, that SEO-wise, your blog roll might do your domain harm? As of this point in time, unless you’re fresh on the scene (wherein which, I would recommend reading through my past posts), we all know what PageRank is. While there are many who frown upon PageRank, it is still highly-regarded since many people believe it to be a key part in being at the top of the SERPs.
Now, as I believe I’ve discussed before, one of Google’s basis for PageRank is links. When you link to other web sites, you’re giving out your PageRank. Now, by default, blogrolls appear on EVERY page of a blog. What this means is that if you have a thousand pages and you have 100 links in your blogroll, you’re giving away 100*1000 PageRank juice. Just imagine if you have 300 links on one page. To be able to level off external links, you need to constantly link to internal pages. With too much external links though, you can’t level it off.
One way to go about it is to remove the blogroll from your internal pages. This means if you have 50 links in your blogroll, then you only have fifty external links. Another would be to use the nofollow attribute to the links in your blogroll. If you’re using WordPress, you can use this tip by Justin Cook. It worked for me like a charm. The hack would add the “nofollow” in the list of rel attributes. You could also try this one by My Digital Life and see if it works for you better.
