Give Your WordPress Blogroll A Beneficial Purpose
As my regular readers will be aware by now, I love WordPress and it’s array of features that help to make it one of the best CMS (Content Management Systems) available. However, some of the features can be put to better use than initially intended, and one such feature is that of the blogroll.
In the WordPress admin panel, there is a tab dedicated to managing your blogroll, and it’s purpose is to,
“…link to the blogs you read frequently - a friendly way of acknowledging the good blogs out there. WordPress’ built-in Links Manager allows you to add and manage links effortlessly”
But lets be realistic, the main benefit of being on someone’s blogroll, isn’t down to the amount of visitors you’ll get from it, but to the increase in pagerank it will help to give, and a greater authority in the search engines. But what about your own blogroll?
The fact is, running a site wide blogroll on your site can have a very negative impact on your WordPress blog. One of my favourite bloggers Andy Beard, wrote some time ago about, “How A Blogroll Can Kill Your Pagerank” In the article he concludes,
“It is not rocket science, just simple maths.
If you have 100 external links on every page of your site, you need loads of internal links to retain some (hopefully most) of your pagerank…or stick them on their own seperate page so they don’t suck your own site dry.”
His final suggestion is what I’ve implemented on this blog. There are some blogs that I greatly respect and would advise people to read, and on that page lists a number of them.
So if I don’t use the blogroll to list my favourite blogs, what can I use it for?
Something that almost every blog should have in it’s sidebar, is a list of recommended articles for visitors to read. On my site I’ve entitled them as “Must Reads”, and I put that list together using the WordPress blogroll management. I know there are a number of plugins that can pull together your best articles by the number of views or comments, but I recommend you hand pick them. Just because an article has received lots of comments, doesn’t mean it’s your best work, or what you’d want visitors to read, and just because a article has had the most views, doesn’t mean it’s relevant anymore.
Or…
For those of you who are able to sell your own text link ads, you could manage your ads very easily using your blogroll.
So, put your blogroll to good use, and list your best articles for all to see, or manage your ads. However, don’t have long list of outbound links.
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22 Responses to “Give Your WordPress Blogroll A Beneficial Purpose”
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Now add this one to your list of must reads, because I have been meaning to suggest for a while that a top posts list should be hand crafted
Your blogroll ideas are very creative. Thanks.
Andy - Great minds think alike, eh? Thanks for the suggestion to place this on the list too, makes my life easier when readers decide for me
Neena - No problem. I’m just glad when my readers get something out of what I write.
Really good advices here Armen!
That post by Andy is really a great read also. I switched my blogroll to have it on a separate wordpress page, but will definitely changed some things on there, I also have the popular post thing, but using the blogroll function to display “must read” posts instead of the most commented on ones, is brilliant!
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Thanks for this, Armen.
I should hand craft my own list and remove the ‘most commented’. Even though I have a specific page for ‘featured articles’, you’re right that some of the ‘most commented’ aren’t particularly what I want first time visitors to read.
Also, thanks for the mention on your links page. It’s an honour!
Jonathan - Good to see you round here, and I’m glad you found the article helpful. I see you’ve got something big up your sleeve. Any date for the launch?
David - No problem, you don’t even have to mention it. As for your articles, I couldn’t help but think of you when I was writing the article, as I bet you have some informative posts that aren’t displayed in your sidebar.
Made a few tweaks to my sidebars. What’s your impression now, Armen? Any improvement?
Well it’s definately cleaner, and the articles you’ve listed are of a high standard and more ‘timeless’. You did well to just put in ten, you have so much there that interested visitors would benefit from.
Ummm, where to start… Outbound links on your own site do NOT “suck your site’s PageRank dry” at all. Your own PageRank is distributed to the outbound links on your site, but the number of links has no effect on your own PageRank. Your view is a common misconception.
Here’s a great post from Smashing Magazine that should be required reading on PageRank:
“Google Pagerank - What Do We Really Know About It?”
And here’s the relevant snippet from the post:
Links don’t give PR away, they are votes. “When a page votes its PageRank value to other pages, its own PageRank is not reduced by the value that it is voting. The page doing the voting doesn’t give away its PageRank and end up with nothing. It isn’t a transfer of PageRank. It is simply a vote according to the page’s PageRank value.â€
Smashing Magazine = very little original research, just a collection of links to others.
However your interpretation of what they are saying is incorrect
All you have to do is play around with a pagerank calculator to see the exact effect of link distribution on pagerank, and that includes your own pages and how they pass on pagerank and other Google juice to the rest of your domain.
With pagerank, you can vote for yourself, and it is better to vote for yourself more than others on each page.
Here’s another explanation of PageRank that includes the algorithm:
http://pr.efactory.de/e-pagerank-algorithm.shtml
Notice that among the terms in that polynomial, there is nothing subtracting from a given page’s PageRank as you are hypothesizing. For you and Armen to be correct, there should be an additional term that subtracts from the PageRank an amount proportional to the number of outbound links on the page.
You are thinking about one individual page, not 1000+ pages on a typical website that could be passing on pagerank to other pages on the domain, but instead are passing out to external sites.
I spend a lot of time working with linking structures, much more than it takes to link to other people’s research.
“WordPress SEO Masterclass For Competitive Niches”
In the second half of the page you are referring to, they discuss the multiple iterations, it is very important.
A page passes pagerank to internal pages, and they through good linking structure pass it back to the original page. With good linking structure it is possible to pass on the benefit of incoming links to your whole domain, or to specific pages.
Nice to wake up to some lively banter this morning!
Patrick - Great to see you here.
I must admit, I’m not a researching SEO/PR expert, and I’m guilty of the exact thing Andy accuses Smashing Mag of; oftentimes I don’t carry out my own research. However, I do read material from areas, and by people whom I trust, and have given sufficient evidence.
Having said that, I do make some personal observations, and I conclude that for the most part, no one has a clue about PR. I mean, I set up a blog for someone just a couple of weeks before the last update, and it ended up with a PR4 and it had hardly any inbound links, or any with weight. I was completely stomped, and I still don’t know how it happened.
Andy carries out extensive research, and I respect his work. His conclusions appear logical, and as they say, “the proof is in the pudding!” Andy has proved his work over and over again in many ways, that’s why I subscribe to his blog, and read his articles.
Andy - Thanks replying to Patrick, I really appreciate it. I couldn’t have answered as articulately as you
Andy,
I completely agree with you about the importance of good internal linking to pass PageRank around within a site. That was never an issue. The only point on which I’m disagreeing is the notion that outbound links can deduct from a page’s PageRank. I’ve read a lot on this topic and I’ve never once come across this hypothesis. If it were true, then Armen would be committing the PageRank equivalent of “hari kari” by removing the nofollow on comment links. Death by a thousand cuts so to speak. His net PageRank would be zero, right?.
“I spend a lot of time working with linking structures, much more than it takes to link to other people’s research.”
Gee, thanks for twisting the knife a bit. I appreciate it. Sorry to ruffle your feathers. I think I’m done with this conversation.
To everyone reading this discussion, take what anybody says on these topics with a large grain of salt (me included). Like Armen said, we really don’t “know” exactly how PageRank works. Kind of like observing the wind by watching how the leaves move. Read a lot, do your own experiments, and use what works for you. Best of luck.
Andy,
OK, I went ahead and read your blog post on this topic and I think I’ve isolated the cause of our disagreement. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to be talking about outbound links reducing the amount of PageRank that a page could be passing to other internal pages. That statement I agree with and it sort of turns the issue on its head relative to how I was looking at it.
What I thought you meant was that on a one-page website (for a simple example), you could actually reduce the PageRank of your single page by having a lot of outbound links. Now I see that this is probably not what you’re saying. Using phrases like “stealing PageRank” is probably what threw me off.
Now my question is whether multiple outbound links to the same page within a site bleed more PageRank than one link. Google seems to say that each site (not each page) can only cast a single “vote” for a given external page. So if that’s true, it wouldn’t matter really if your blogroll was on every page or just one page… at least in terms of PageRank passed to the external pages. But the question remains, does having a blogroll on every page damage your own internal PageRank? Can a site cast multiple “votes” for its own pages through internal linking or does the “one vote per site” rule apply here as well? I honestly don’t know, but I’d sure like to find out.
It is know that the major search engines discount the value of sitewide links, but I think they are generally looked on as passing more benefit to the receiving site.
If they pass on more benefit, they must take more away.
What I don’t know is how many pages of content Google need to determine that something is sitewide, or to work out which part of a page is content, and which is navigation.
Where in the calculation such discounting would take place is extremely hard to determine.
Other major factors include how relevance and anchor text adds additional benefit to the links, whereas links in comments could well be negated a percentage just like the sidebar if they are not to relevant content.
In regards to twisting the knife, remember that it was my original article was the one brought into question, and whilst it is quite old compared to most of my content, most of my SEO content is along the same themes. and is fairly unique.
“hari kari” - it is totally true, but then Armen whilst not having a perfect linking structure (and I don’t yet either, though at least I have mapped out what I want to achieve), has a good 50+ links to internal pages on the page, and discussion like this has proven in the past to bring him some decent links from outside.
Good conversations also encourage more subscribers, and with more subscribers, you get more editorial links.
Really appreciate the dialogue here guys.
Andy - I noticed someone recently talking about removing DoFollow prior to the up and coming PR update. But surely if you’re going to do that, there’s not much point in having it in the first place. Am I correct?
I have seen it too. I am not going to say it has no merit, and there are other concerns.
It is something I am planning a post on, but ultimately the people worried about it are not thinking about all the additional benefits, and generally have poor linking structure.
Another issue to keep in mind (again this is something I read and not something I’ve gone out and confirmed) is that Google claims to update PageRank on a daily basis. It’s just the public update that occurs once every few months. And the PageRank algorithm gets tweaked all the time.
So even in a perfect world, we may be able to reverse engineer the PageRank formula from four months ago, but Google has already moved away from it and the new ranks that are released would probably contradict what we’ve learned. In other words, it’s a moving target.
I was happy to find this dialogue and what to do with the empty blogroll space since I moved my blogroll to a separate page after reading Andy Beards blog. Thanks for the insights from everyone also…Jude
Patrick - It’s a moving target for sure.
Judy - No probs. Glad to help!