Subscribe Feed (RSS)Are Blogrolls Dead or Do I Need One?
December 13th, 2006 by Joshua Dorkin | Filed under Blogging, SEO.
I haven’t heard much conversation in the blogosphere about the use of blogrolls. What I have seen is that the top blogs no longer use them. Is this a recent trend? I have my theories, but I think the blogroll is still important for newer blogs.
Today, one of my favorite real estate bloggers, Teresa, asked me about my blogroll, and it all came to me. For a while I had been thinking about removing my blogroll, but her email put me over the edge; I removed the blogroll on my real estate blog. In case you’re wondering, I’ve been averaging several hundred subscribers a day for the blog’s feed, and our daily site traffic is pretty decent as well.
Why Get Rid of Your Blogroll?
I regularly read hundreds of other real estate blogs and if I were to have an up to date blogroll of my favorites, there would be too many links to realistically keep. In addition, there is no longer the need to do “link exchanges” on my blog to draw traffic. It now has a life of its own and it gets most of its traffic organically.
I think that once your blog gets to this point, you can start to think about saying goodbye to your blogroll. You’d be better served focusing on selling advertising, as you are likely now getting enough traffic to make some decent money with your blog. The easiest way to do that is thorough a link broker like Text Link Ads.
Why a Blogroll is Important for New Bloggers
Blogrolls are still useful tools for newer bloggers. An easy way to build backlinks is to forge relationships with other bloggers and put their link on your blogroll; in exchange, they would put your link on theirs. These links will help you grow your blog and your audience. The blogroll’s purpose here would be to serve as a forum for you to do a link exchange. One of the most fundamental ways to start to get traffic for your site is to do this.
What do you think about blogrolls? Are they just another trend from the past?
I have a blogroll, and you are on it, because you have a great blog. I also put new bloggers on my blogroll to help them get started as so many people have helped me. My firends at Sellsius helped when I was just starting out by putting me on their blogroll, as did Growabrain and biggerpockets with a post about my blog. I see that you still have a blogroll and I would suggest that you have room for at least a 1000 links. If you need help putting them all on, just send me an email and I will build the list for you so you can just cut and paste. We little bloggers need you.
Thanks T. I agree with everything you’ve said. It just doesn’t make sense at a certain point in time keeping 1,000 sites in your blogroll.
All my best!
As Google is becoming more objectionable towards sitewide links, more and more people are exchanging links in posts and doing weekly traffic trades, especially in the entertainment industry.
Allen.H
Some of us don’t intend to monetize our blogs with adwords. I just want to get clients, so I don’t really want ads of any type on my site. At least right now.
The blogroll has helped me immensely. I don’t see it taking that much time for me to manage. I do add newer blogs to my roll to help them too. Like Teresa, grow a brain and a few others helped me out when I was getting started.
[...] was asking whether blogrolls were dead, and whether or not he needs one. I’ve read conflicting arguments on this one, and for now [...]