Blogrolls

As I said in the Currency of Linking, links have value in ways that ordinary free things, such as leaves, do not. Search engines value links as a sign of the relevancy and quality of the content on a blog. The folks at Google, Yahoo, MSN, and others to varying degrees look at links as part of how they determine how important a blog or web site is within the overall context of the Internet and it’s millions of places where you might go. One kind of link is on a Blogroll.

Blogroll Linking

Blogrolls are links to an entire blog’s contents. You see a short few in the sidebar to this blog. Most blogs have a blogroll. Blogrolls started as a way for one blogger to tell the others, “These are bloggers I think are worth reading. Click on through and check them out.” The blogroll has taken on many functions depending on the blogger who builds it.

• Some bloggers still hold to that original definition of a blogroll, limiting their list to a handful of the blogs they want to recommend. Folks who do this will tell you that the blogroll reflects upon the blogger.
• Others folks recommend blogs they find interesting in a variety of areas as a service to their readers.
• Still others take advantage of the blogroll to network and place links there in hope to gain attention and possibly a link back from the blog they’ve blogrolled.
• Yet even others trade or buy links to blogs they’ve never read solely for the purpose of boosting their own blog’s rank — to get a higher placement when readers search for something the blogger might be writing about.

Two choices serve readers. Two choices serve blog owners. As I said earlier,

Search engines value links as a sign of the relevancy and quality of the content on a blog.

Sad to think, isn’t it, that sometimes search engines are more insightful than the folks who write blogs?

Liz Strauss