Why no blogrolls?

[John Scott]

Why is it that a lot of folks don't have blogrolls on their blogs?

Why???

[Ferre]

Check the 'updated blogrolls' and see for yourself how blogging is a spammers tool.

Most of those blogs have titles such as;

Compare Auto Insurance Saint James
Online Best Deal Automotive Loan Concho
Bad Credit South San Francisco Car Loans
Online Flower Delivery St Landry
Chariton Auto Insurance Company
Buy The Hammocks Car Insurance
Online Poker
easy pics at easypics.hairsalons.be
Buy Hooksett Car Insurance
Best Car Insurance Providers Hagerstown
ETC...

I have that blogroll thing, but it's worthless crap and doesn't bring anything, unless you are a spammer like most of the listed blogrollers.

Since blogging became popular, "freedom of speech" became "freedom for spamming"

[Ferre]

ps. check out the 'busy' forum they have and see how popular it is for 'real people'

http://forums.blogrolling.com/

[DarkNinja]

Sorry but can someone explain blogrolling for me?

[Julie]

People don't have them because they are greedy bastards who think they are too cool to link to others. They want lots of links to them, but don't want to return the favor.

[veridicus]

I don't read any particular blogs on a regular basis. If I come across something interesting and relevant I post about it.

As a side benefit having it in one post and not on every page helps the other post with page rank. Plus I'll link directly to the interesting article which helps their internal page rank. So I'm actually doing others a favor by not having a blogroll.

[Julie]

I think people should have both - a blogroll and links within posts when relevant.

[John Scott]

Originally Posted by Julie

I think people should have both - a blogroll and links within posts when relevant.

My sentiments precisely.

[BWelford]

I think blogrolls can be your personal effort to level the playing field a little. I use Bloglines and you can identify each subscription as either public or private. Only the public ones go in your blogroll which is available to anyone who is interested. Only about 20% of my subscriptions are in my blogroll. I don't think you need to know I read Matt Cutts. However there are some others I've found that you might find interesting. So those are the ones I leave as public.

[John Scott]

Originally Posted by BWelford

I think blogrolls can be your personal effort to level the playing field a little.

Welcome to v7n Barry

I like that - level the playing field.

Aaron Wall, whom I love dearly, has posted a different take on blogrolls here, and it's all good to me, but I do think that social blogging should involve a lot of linking to other blogs, whether it be by blogroll or by posting links in the body of the blog posts.

[BWelford]

Thanks for the welcome, John.

Hopefully your $10,000 Blogger Challenge will also help to level the playing field.

[John Scott]

It may not do much in that direction, sadly, but I do hope to introduce a lot of newer, quality blogs to readers.

[DarrenC]

I think its a great idea getting people to link to lesser known blogs - I've certainly had some fun trying to find non-commercial blogs, which aren't littered with spam and google adsense.

I've just started a 'travel blog of the day' entry in my travel rants blog to highlight some lesser known blogs.

Darren

[noob_0001]

Originally Posted by DarkNinja

Sorry but can someone explain blogrolling for me?

Very simply a blogroll is a list of links to sites or blogs that you think are good, useful or something that your user migh like to know about. They can also be to friends blogs. In your blog software there is an option to add links to this blogroll. You actuall can have many of them. Perhaps one on your front page and one for each broad topic that you blog on.

That is it in a nutshell.

[Cricket]

Originally Posted by Julie

People don't have them because they are greedy bastards who think they are too cool to link to others. They want lots of links to them, but don't want to return the favor.

I have never been one to link just for the sake of linking. However, I definitely link to sites and blogs within my articles on a very regular basis. I do so when it is relevant to the topic I am writing about and it benefits my readers as a further resource.

I disable the no follow tag for comments on my blogs, as I feel that anyone (except spammers) taking the time to comment, should have a link back to their site.

I also have a category for featured sites, where I post articles I have written featuring sites that I feel are outstanding and would benefit my target audience. If I think a product or service is great, I tend to tell anyone that will listen to me.

In the end, I probably have far more outgoing links than most folks, with absolutely no expectation of a link in return. Those links just don't happen to be listed all together on a blogroll.

Hope this doesn't make me a greedy bastard who thinks I'm too cool to link to others.

[John Scott]

*Changing Cricket's User Title to "Greedy Bastard" *

[sitetutor]

Originally Posted by Julie

People don't have them because they are greedy bastards who think they are too cool to link to others. They want lots of links to them, but don't want to return the favor.

I agree 100%. And I'm sad to say that in the seo world, we see the link greediest people period. Everything is about "where do you link back" etc., when in reality search engines are well aware of the fact that people do link out for reasons other than just seo crap. The outgoing links do actually help in many cases. And all the talk about drianing PR is not valid either looking at some very high ranked blogs such as http://www.designers-who-blog.com/ which ranks very well and has 100s of blogs.

I really like bloggers a lot better than seos, more creative and inspiring

So everyone start linking to my blog now to prove that you're not a greedy bastard

[John Scott]

Ya know, some people don't do blogrolls for the aesthetics of it. Understandable.