Why I Have No Blogroll
For the uninitiated a Blogroll is supposedly a list of links to the blogs that your read or that you consider to be your friends.
I have no blogroll (perhaps that means that I have no friends) and when someone suggested that I should have one in a comment on my post Five Reasons Why This Small Business Blog Sucks I suggested that blogrolls were incestuous.
Perhpas that was a little blunt and Stowe Boyd says it in a much more gentle way here.
January 27th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
[...] Edit: Down in the comments you will see where I was rather blunt with someone who kindly suggested that I really did need a blog roll. Perhaps I could have explained it a little more gently and that’s what I try to do here in Why I Have No Blogroll Technorati Tags: small business [...]
January 27th, 2006 at 2:45 pm
“Blogrolls” not only provide more information a blog’s readers. It also is one more benefit and tool of a blog in search engines. I quite frankly don’t understand your reason.
January 27th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
G’day Grant
You make two points about why people should have blog rolls.
Let me deal with the second one first - search engines. I have a motoring blog that I started in November of 2005 - every month since I started it I have doubled my search engine traffic and I don’t have a blog roll. I’m now at the point where I make a post on that blog today and in two to three days time Google is sending me search engine traffic for the key term in that post,
My partner and I have been around the net since 1996 when we launched our first site - we know how to achieve good search engine rankings and we can do it without blog rolls.
Now to your first point - blog rolls provide more information.
Not necessarily Grant - all they do is tie people down to what might be one small group’s version of truth - reality - call it whatever you want.
I write my blogs to provide information and I want my readers to question what I say and to challenge what I say and to think about it so I want them to go off and find more information for themselves. I don’t want them to wander over to my blog roll buddy and find the same information there. I want them to work for their information because they will get ore out of it if they do.
There is also a marketing issue involved here and that’s another reason why I don’t want people coming to my site after they have been round and round in a circle with my blog roll buddies.
You may not understand it but it works for me on a number of levels and the quote I gave back to that other guy’s blog explains it quite well.