Reading a humor blog where the author digressed into talking about their blogroll prompted me to share my thoughts here. If you read that article, you see the I’ve already replied to him… but there’s more to it!

Bloggers feel slightly embarrassed, sometimes, that the things we do (such as blogrolling, commenting, adding friends in social networks) we do because we want to build traffic for our own sites. We all know it’s what we do, but it’s somehow a shameful secret, especially when you’re writing a personal blog.

The truth is, there’s nothing wrong with dropping the dead weight from your blogroll, and in fact, it’s not good for your site’s pagerank to just indiscriminately link anyway. Why should you care about your pagerank? If you aren’t interested in making some dosh with your blog, it doesn’t matter in the least. But if you want to build traffic, and use something like PayPerPost or sell text ads, it can matter a great deal! (And then there are those of us who are obnoxiously competitive and just want the best numbers we can get on a site so we feel some tiny rush of ’success’ every time we visit our stats page.)

So, here are my personal rules for blogrolls on all my various blogs (I have more than I like to admit).

• When I add someone to my blogroll, I usually let them know via a comment on their site such as (This post is great.. it prompted me to add you to my blogroll.) Often people don’t pay attention or know how to find out, so it’s not really fair to get mad at someone because it’s possible they don’t know you added them.
• If someone doesn’t reciprocate, I very often remove them. And there’s nothing in the world wrong with that. I usually give people 2-3 weeks, because not everyone is as obsessive about their blogs as I am. If you want to link to someone who doesn’t link to you, perhaps consider adding a ‘Helpful Links’ list and keeping them separate.
• If someone doesn’t update their blog regularly, I remove them without remorse. Remember, I’m recommending these sites to my own readers, and I don’t want to send them to dead sites.
• I never write to someone requesting to be added to their blogroll. As one of my favourite bloggers said, “That’s like inviting yourself to dinner.” If someone wants to be added to mine, I will only do it if I like their site. Again it’s the question: “Would I recommend this to a friend?” If not, I won’t recommend it to strangers either.
• You do not have to link to everyone that links to you. Sounds like this conflicts with my second rule above, but if you don’t like a site well enough to return, you shouldn’t feel obligated. Don’t devalue your own blogroll out of guilt!

Another trend of note is that some people put their blogrolls on separate pages. I would warn you that if you’re going to do this, anyone you have traded links with might feel slightly conned. They want the highest pagerank page possible linking to them, and that is almost always the main page. Not to mention that most of your readers will skip this page.

I have also noticed that some people keep a blogroll that extends down half (if not all) of their page, some even having hundreds of links! In my opinion, this devalues the blogroll completely, and only the top three or four are going to get any hits from you. Not to mention it’s just page clutter!

Last point: there is nothing wrong with being ruthless about who is and isn’t on your blogroll! It’s your website, and you should use your links in a way that benefits your site, whether that’s linking to sites you like and value, or using it to build your own traffic and pagerank.

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