Dump the Blogroll
July 11th, 2007 · by David Bradley
Wayne Smallman over on the technology news site BlahBlahTech dumped his blogroll this week. He had several very good reasons, not least was that a lack of context for all those links to external sites means the blogroll has had its day and is no longer providing a service to readers. Shame, he tells me he was going to add Sciencetext but then changed his mind.
Anyway, there is another very good reason to dump your blogroll, or at the very least check the links on a fairly regular basis and make sure they are pointing to legitimate sites - Bad domains.
What do I mean bad domains? You never gave a link to a site without checking it out, I hear you cry! Well, what about that site you added three years ago? Great little blog…loads of useful content…virtually no ads…perfect for your blogroll.
Well, the domain expired and was bought up by a link farm splogger who added a massive directory pointing to all her casino affiliate sites.
You’re now linking to that domain! And Google doesn’t like sites that link to other sites like that, it reflects badly on you, and they’re just about to penalize your site by dropping it.
Of course, this is a worst-case scenario, but I’ve seen some great sites come and go over the last decade and a half and some of them have ended up being taken over by illicit Rx sites, casino rings, and pr0n sites. It’s definitely not a great idea to be connecting to them.
So, while you may not be ready to ditch your whole blogroll just for this small risk, do check over those links once in a while, maybe even trim the list down to the essential top ten so you can manage them more effectively. Just don’t get caught with your blogroll in a casino that’s all.
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9 responses so far ↓
robwatts // Jul 11, 2007 at 4:59 pm
I’d keep the blog rolls, yet restrict them to front page only or nofollow them on internal pages.
As you say, if you manage your blog properly, you should catch the odd site gone bad.
I can envisage a greater difficulty where one has to manage multiple blogs, yet on balance I’d say blog rolls are a good thing, especially when starting out.
David Bradley // Jul 11, 2007 at 5:03 pm
Yes, Rob, you’re right, of course, it would be far too rash to ditch blogrolls altogether, but there is a serious side to just idling along and adding links on an ad hoc basis without checking back from time to time. Now, if there were some way to scan one’s links automatically and check that they don’t point to banned or dangerous sites that would be rather useful. Anyone got a plugin that does that?
robwatts // Jul 11, 2007 at 5:10 pm
Well, php has all manner of networking functions.
Im sure that something could be written that used Curl.
You could use a cronjob to periodically read the homepages of sites in your blogroll, and compare the text against a list of stopwords in say a db or textfile somewhere…
I might just code it if I find the time
David Bradley // Jul 11, 2007 at 5:19 pm
That would be ab fab…come back and let us know when you do, it will get pride of place on this site.
jeremy // Jul 12, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Hmmm, I didn’t even think that my blogroll could have such an adverse effect. Good thing I’m really anal about who I link to.
What if you link to a blog in your posts, and the blog goes under? Does that have the same adverse effect? if so, I’ve got a buttload of links there that could be a huge pain in the arse.
David Bradley // Jul 12, 2007 at 5:07 pm
Jeremy, I don’t think it will in general have a very seriously adverse effect, although a friend of mine who had a chemistry site many years ago, let the domain lapse and it was quickly commandeered by pornographers, left lots of chemistry directories pointing to a rather tasteless domain until word got around.
jeremy // Jul 12, 2007 at 6:09 pm
phew, ok. Still a good reason to keep my site as quality as I can make it, and maybe build a fort around it.
David Bradley // Jul 12, 2007 at 9:03 pm
Jeremy, that’s always a good strategy for any blog: First, make it as good as you can, secondly, make it secure and protect it from dodgy sites, link farms, and spam.
Hsien Lei // Jul 20, 2007 at 12:40 pm
The most annoying thing I find about blogrolls is when they get too long and unwieldy for display. I get around that by showing a random selection of 10 on each pageload.
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