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Internet Marketing Coach
How Big is your Blogroll -or- The Importance of Link Juice
October 8th, 2007 | 9 commentsRecently I’ve been noticing more and more blogs that have blogrolls of 10, 20 even 30 or more links. Some of these are really good blogs and a few even rank pretty well. When I see these blogs I often wonder if they realize how much ranking they are giving away.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against a little link love. As a matter of fact I’m very much for it. But giving a little link love here and there and giving someone a link on every single page of your blog are two totally different things.
To me, link juice is extremely important. The more I can preserve for my own pages, your dofollowed comment links and links in individual posts the better. If my blogroll had loads of links, the link juice that passes on to my other pages, your dofollowed comment links and other people’s links that I link to in individual posts would be far less!
If someones blog is so good that you want to give them a sitewide link, then you’ll probably be linking to their posts often anyway. Preserve your link juice by reducing the size of your blog roll and do just that. Link to their posts and give them link love that way. This way when you do link to their posts they will get more out of it and your own posts will rank higher, as the blogroll is no longer sucking up all your link juice.
The fact that every page on the Internet distributes PR among all the links that appear on it isn’t anything new. It’s just surprising how many people don’t think of that when building their blogroll.
My aim isin’t to criticize anyone. It’s actually to help anyone that will listen. If you have 10 or more links in your blogroll and you reduce that number considerably, I almost guarantee your blog’s rankings will gradually increase, as it’s own links will now be getting much more link juice.
Just food for thought, hopefully a few people eat it 
Popularity: 9% [?]
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8th October, 2007 at 9:58 am
That’s a good thought, Josh. I tend to be pretty generous with sitewide linking (to friends’ sites as well as other blogs), but I’m not sure it’s not to any great end anyway. I guess the smart thing to do instead would be to dedicate a page to outbound links, and link to THAT page with a sitewide internal link instead. It would also help reduce clutter. Thanks for the idea!
8th October, 2007 at 11:37 am
Thanks for sharing this, Josh. I am still learning about this area and I guess I kinda stumbled onto it in the sense that my ‘blogroll’ really sits on one page (”Links”). Reading this, I will look more into it and in the meantime, it shall remain status quo taking into consideration what you have said here. In practise, I am also more likely to show link love by linking to others’ individual pages within posts - the whole thing is still very new to me and coming to grips with it.
8th October, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Hi Josh,
Check out Dane Morgan’s Load Up Your Blog Roll Without Overloading Your Blog post for a really neat solution to this problem. Basically he recommends adding one page for your entire blogroll, then displaying 5 random entries in the sidebar with a link to the blogroll page (he tells you how to do this).
I don’t have a blogroll yet, but it will be coming soon and both you and Dane will be on it.
9th October, 2007 at 3:48 am
I don’t have a blogroll - not because I’m clever and thought about this already, I just don’t think blogrolls are particularly valuable. I display social blogging widgets in my sidebar, this gives exposure to my visitors and their posts.
I also syndicate my Stumbles RSS feed in the sidebar, and, also using RSS, the recent post from a Bumpzee community that I feel is relevant to my blog and changes with my mood. Additionally there is a feed excerpt from 5Star affiliate forums and blogs.
Presumably this means I am leaking rank like a sieve! Should I reconsider my generosity with my sidebar link love I wonder?
9th October, 2007 at 3:58 am
It sure does man. I nofollow all links that don’t need link juice including affiliate links. Of course my blogs rankings aren’t incredibly off the charts yet, but I do know it’s good practice.
9th October, 2007 at 4:45 am
Well I try to remember to nofollow affiliate links certainly, and I’m beginning to think I should do the same with internal links.
Because I’m using an RSS feed, via a plugin for most of the sidebar links I’m not sure how, or even if, I can nofollow them.
Yep, I’d say you’ve given me some food for thought.
9th October, 2007 at 6:58 pm
Well, I’m glad I read this post because it made me look at what was wrong and find a fix for it.
I’m feeling pretty proud of myself because I didn’t even ask for help. I found my way into a couple of Nucleus plugin codes and managed to work out how to include a nofollow for any links provided by syndicated RSS feeds, such as my Stumbleupon blog. Now my leaking pagerank problems should be a thing of the past
Thanks Josh, you learn something new every day, all I need now is a pagerank to protect LOL!
10th October, 2007 at 3:36 am
I only have 2 in there and haven’t really though about it. I don’t put too much because don’t want anyone to leave my blog
11th October, 2007 at 8:06 pm
I blogroll to other sites in my network. So, I keep building each of their PR’s. It helps a lot too in Google!