I have added one…that’s all I can say, I’ll try it out for six months and see what happens. If I notice a surge, great.

One thing though that your right on is, that quality content, with informative follow up links, drives traffic to your site and search engines like Google, Yahoo, Live, Love You…

Increasing the quality of my content has helped me 100%

Just taking a few days to do so as I’m still under two months of having renewed home computer access at home.. So much to do, so little Time each day.. :))

It’s not been on my main index page ever since I discovered a great Wordpress plugin created by Zühlke O’Connor – Zo’C Powerblogroll Plugin.

My index page is now reserved for bloggers I have constant contact with either via email or in person.

Google doesn’t seem to mind as it hasn’t hurt page rank at all (unless I should be a 7 or 8).

The benefits?

1) At a glance I can easily see which subjects I need to cover more (which is what brought me here – I was looking for blog designers to add to DWB).

2) I can see which blogs I’ve featured without going through the archives (that’s been updated too and is quite handy, but not as easy to skim as the blog roll).

3) It’s a useful resource for those looking for blogs by subject.

But it’s really down to your niche and what services you provide. From the very beginning I choose readers over potential page rank, even though I was warned against it.

This was because DWB was meant to be a play blog where I learned how to blog so I took a different aim from the beginning.

Yeah, if I’d known it was going to last this long, I would have named it something more massively more clever than ‘Designers who Blog”.

Hindsight …

I am working on adding another blogroll but the links are to specific articles from my own blog. This is for a random list of other articles and using blogroll lets me set the odds of each article coming up.

I’ve had a few requests from people to add their sites to my blogroll, but I simply explain that I keep my blogroll to the sites I actually read. They all take that graciously. Of course, I also thank them for the tip and that I am going to subscribe to check it out.

i heard people say that people will ban those blog who had BLOGROLL.

google is smart this day..

actually, google is ban blog put FEATURED SITE @ paid link @ text-link-ads links…

does this true??

I also put it up to give me quick access to blogs I am likely to comment on. I don’t know if it is the link from the blogroll or the fact that I comment on these blogs, but it makes me smile when people Like Darren actually show up on my blog catalog or mybloglog widget.

If you are a niche blogger, having one linking to all your competitors might not be the best thing unless you are getting reciprocal linking and aren’t always blogging the same ideas. Some niches like social issues like I have on one of my blogs had the same thing Darren mentioned happen to it, where people begging to get on it, but then when I added them I actually started losing Page Rank so I dropped the whole thing.

My new option is simply to make a noindex, nofollow links page. People like Darren get mentioned enough in my posts that any other linking I give them really is just superficial and a convenient place to have them collected, which is something else to think about when mentioning another blog often.

However, I am slow to add them on my own site, and hope other are too. I would like to spend a wee bit of time around the site before I recommend it to others – again back to “thought leadership.”

Thanks for you power posting Darren. You are a not only a good source, but an inspiration.

Thanks.

All that being said, I think the key phrase is “well-edited.” I don’t think blogrolls should be rewards for others linking to you. The blog has to have some value for your audience. And you have to check them regularly to make sure the link still works, the blog is still what you thought it was, etc. (I subscribe via RSS to all the stuff on my blogrolls so I can see what I’m sending people to.)

I’ve seen a few blogs where the list gets unruly. Subcategories can help with that. You have to make it easy for different types of readers to find what they are interested in specifically.

I wonder though, do you think blogrolls should be alphabetical or do you think they should be listed in descending interest value? I go back and forth on what I think is more user-friendly.

Be weary of the built in wordpress blogroll, it’s not google friendly. For a more Google friendly, and safe to show off, blogroll do the following.

Go to Google Reader (where you can see which blogs you follow via RSS) and create a folder. Place all of the blogs you follow in that folder. Make it public, grab the Google widget code for that folder – paste it to your site.

It’s javascript so you lose no juice and it displays who you really do follow via RSS. Try it.