Blogroll - For traffic, Not for Search Engine ranking

Ever since I started blogging, I have noticed that many people have taken to the concept of ‘blogrolling‘. If you have not come across this previously, let me explain what it does.

Blogrolling is a website that offers to manage the ‘reciprocal links’ on your blogs. Simple Search engine optimization suggests that the more inbound links you have for your website, the better it is indexed by Search Engines and hence more traffic.

Since most of us have problems with editing the default templates that come with blogs, Blogrolls help in managing the links to other blogs from your blog (which you do after agreeing to the other blogger to get a link to your blog from his own).

But, before you proceed, here is something you need to look at. Understand if your reciprocal links are for search engine traffic or simply links from your friends. There are numerous blogs of personal lives and the bloggers prefer to link to all their friends so that it is easy to navigate between the blogs of friends. Blogrolling is very useful here.

But, if you blog on a subject and you want to have traffic from the search engines, let me tell you that Blogrolling does not help.

PHP vs. Javascript

The basic reason for this is because of the language used to write the code. Basic blogrolling code that you use on free blogs like Blogspot or Wordpress have to be in javasctipt. Javascript is a client side code which is not read by search engines. So, it does not actually consider a blogroll link from a free blog, that has the code in javascript, a link ,and hence no points; which means no improvement in search engine ranking. Whereas a PHP code is a server side language which is read by search engines and hence a link in this improves search engine rank.

What should I do?

If you have been on blogroll, you would have seen that they also offer a PHP code for providing the links. If you have your blog hosted on a paid server, you will most probably have PHP support. Use the PHP code provided by Blogroll for linking.

But,it still does not help as you are only providing links to others’ blogs. To help your blog, make sure you get blogrolled by bloggers who have hosted on paid servers, and who have the PHP code version of blogroll on them.

Finally, if you understood nothing of what I have written above, do not worry, get your friends to use conventional HTML anchor text to link to you. Don’t go for blogrolling at all!