Ah, the blog roll: those links pointing to other websites, located in the sidebar. We’ve all seen them and many of us have one on our own blog or website. The concept is courteous, to give recognition to your peers and to bloggers you admire. In return we hope other bloggers will include our site in their blog rolls, giving us exposure, traffic and some SEO love.
Except…
The traditional blog roll is a set of site-wide links. Search engines don’t like site-wide links. They consider them manipulative, an attempt to artificially impact the search engine rankings. How does Google and Bing treat blog rolls? Here is the worst case:
- They are a negative SEO signal against the website hosting the blog roll because you put site-wide link on your blog.
- It is possible that blog roll links hurt the sites to which they point. If enough sites point site-wide links at your website the search engines may think you solicited these links for SEO.
In the past we’ve thought of blog roll links as good for search engine optimization. They’ve always been considered a sign of respect. Today we are not so sure. Certainly a set of site-wide links in a blog roll is different than site-wide text links in the footer. Those footer links are a pretty blatant clue that you’re engaging in SEO spam.
If I was a member of the Google Search Quality Team I would solve this by writing an algorithm to identify blog roll links then count each site-wide link only once. This way a popular website might benefit from having links on lots of different websites, but the gross impact of site-wide links, all sending PageRank or authority, would be eliminated. Of course Google is not talking.
Blog roll links come with another SEO issue, they can be largely reciprocal. Say your website is among the top 100 wedding blogs. Your blog roll likely contains links to many of the other top 100 wedding blogs. Search engines don’t like reciprocal links either, again because they tend to be artificial.
The third SEO issue with site-wide blog roll links is that you send a little PageRank or authority off of your site with each external link. If you have ten blog roll links on every page it adds-up. That’s raw ranking strength you could be keeping for yourself.
It comes down to this, how do we promote our peers and minimize negative SEO impact at the same time? I have two suggestions:
- Write blog posts about other websites. Finding ways to write about content on other sites, then linking to specific pages, rather than the home page, is a great way to cross-promote. Staying with the top wedding blogs theme as an example, you might write a monthly post listing the top ten inspiration boards on other sites. This gives you the opportunity to link to ten different websites 12 times a year. That’s 120 promotional links. Network privately with other bloggers and arrange to cross-promote by writing about each other’s postings from time to time.
- Move your blog roll out of the side bar and onto a single page. This will conserve PageRank and eliminate site-wide links to other websites. This is not a perfect solution. You still have a reciprocal links page. Still, it’s just one page so, while the search engines may choose to ignore the links for SEO purposes, you’re still being a good community member.
When it comes to SEO, search engines look at a variety of signals, not only links. If a website is worth linking to from your blog roll you should also be mentioning it in your own blog posts, tweets, Facebook page, Google+ thread and other places from time to time. Use the author tag and add account relationships to your Google profile links. Then, email other bloggers in your niche and invite them to team-up with you to write about each other’s activities or stories from time to time. Yes, you are creating a network. Yes, you are planning to exchange links on your blog and social media accounts. The difference is, instead of doing one-to-one link exchanges you’re creating a conversation. That’s a lot more natural, interesting, and useful to your audience or readers.
Search engines know websites collaborate and cross-promote. They just want you to be earnest about it. Setting-up a bunch of site-wide or reciprocal links lacks quality. It’s not a meaningful experience for users. Including links within real posts and real messages that are meaningful or useful to your readers, now that’s a wholly different approach, one the search engines can respect.
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