About Blogrolling:

Blogrolling is a term for a creating a link list of other blogs on their blog sidebar. What makes blogrolls so powerful is they can be used as link exchanges. Unlike many link exchanges, it doesn’t hurt the aesthetics of your site because blogrolls are very accepted in the blogging community. Long blogrolls can even be a sign of “authority” among bloggers on that topic.

Advantages of Blogrolling:

I don’t know why bloggers don’t focus on blogrolling more. I think some bloggers fear that having too many outlinks or even having a blogroll will cause them to lose traffic by people leaving their site. That is a completly false. Not only will you get direct traffic from other bloggers, but it will have a powerful SEO effect. Getting those backlinks from other websites who share similiar topics to your blog will dramatically increase your ranking in the SERP (search engine result pages). Most people don’t know that a large majority of new users to your site will be coming to your site randomly through the search engines. That is why it is important to boost your rankings in the search engines by boosting your backlinks via exchanging links.

Tips on how to get a lot of Blogroll links:

Part of getting a big blogroll is to make it easy for potential bloggers to want to ask you for one. My first tip is to add your blog link first and then ask the potential blogger to add yours. It will be much harder psychologically for a blogger to turn you down if you do it this way. On Dollars Blog I didn’t have to do that, but on some of my other blogs I’ve had to actively go out and pre-emptively add my link first and then ask them. Many times they will oblige and return the favor. Another cool tip too is to advertise inside the blogroll you are exchanging links. I used to have a link that said on my blogroll “WANT YOUR BLOG LINK HERE?”. That creates a lot of attention to any potential bloggers.

One word of caution is, don’t just add anyone. You want to show your other bloggers in your blogroll some courtesy by not adding everything under the sun. You want to add blogs that are relevant to your topic, have been around at least 1 to 3 months, and have some quality to them. Adding blogs not relevant to your topics will also get you negative points in the search engines, especially google. With a long blogroll, future bloggers will be less eager to want to link exchange with you. So, that is another reason you must make sure you start to build quality blogroll links in the beginning.

How Google Pagerank works:

Each time a site passes a link to another page it gives it a “vote” towards increasing it’s pagerank value. Each page on a website will have different pagerank values depending on what pagerank backlinks it receives. The pagerank function is a recursive function. In other words, the Google spider goes through a bunch of internal calculations by following through a network of links between websites. Through this process it finds out who is linking to who and to what degree. After it calculates this, it gives each web page a PR number.

The pagerank function is logarithmic. In other words a PR site of 5 is going to have many more times the “voting power” to another site than a pagerank 1 site. Very few sites link to PR 1 sites, and the ones that do usually have low PR’s themselves. If it had some higher PR sites linking to it, than it would have a higher PR than 1. It will take a lot more low PR sites to increase your website’s PR number, than if you just had a few high PR backlinks. Your goal should be to place more importance on getting backlinks from a few sites with high PR instead of trying to get it from dozens of low PR sites.

One thing you must keep in mind is that sites that give you a redirect or a nofollow in the tag, will not give you any Pagerank. Many sites sneak these into the link tags, so it’s important you check beforehand the source code of the page.

Internal Pagerank flow:

There is a way to improve the pagerank on all the pages of your website slightly, without getting more backlinks. It is done by manipulating how the google spider “follows” the pages of your website.

In order to do this, on every page you should have a link pointing to another page in the website. There should be no pages where there is not another page linking to it. In other words, the Google spider should be able to follow from one link and get to every other page of your entire website by following links. Think of it as being able to draw a stickman without picking up the pencil. At the end of that link “chain”, the Google spider should be able to “loop back” to the first page so it can increase everyone’s internal PR numbers.

Before you do this, you must figure out though which is the most important webpage on your site. This will be the page that you want to have slightly more PR than any other page on your website. For most sites, it’s the front of the website. On other sites it may be the forum or blog directory you want emphasis on for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes.

For example Lets say you have Page A,B,C. Page A is the one you chose as the one you want the highest PR value of all 3. In order for the recursive calculations to give you maximum internal PR to each page, but slightly more to page A, you should have a link in page A point to B, B than point back to A, another link in Page A point to Page C, and C point also back to A.

The reason why this works is because you are using Page A’s power to “bounce back” to it again. If you were to have A –>B —C—> —> A ,like one big loop, the PR would get diluted among all the pages along the way. As a result, Page A wouldn’t get the targeted boost in it’s PR value compared to the other 3.

Pagerank and outgoing links:

Each link’s pagerank voting power is based on the page’s pagerank divided by how many outgoing links there are. For example, a high PR site with many links is not gonna have as much PR passing value per link than if it has very few outgoing links on it’s site. As a result, you can help your internal pages’ pagerank by putting nofollow tags on outgoing links to other websites. Nofollow tags rel=”nofollow” are put inside your href link tag.

The use of these nofollow tags on these links is a way to increase the pagerank voting power of the rest of the links you don’t put a nofollow on. In other words, you increase the pagerank voting power for one internal page to the next, by not diluting your pagerank votes as a result of the other outgoing links.

For example, in our previous example, the links going between A, B, and C should not have nofollow’s on them. You will want to put a nofollow on other outgoing links on those webpages that are pointing to other people’s websites.

Reciprocal vs. one way backlinks:

In general, reciprocal links don’t do as much for boosting Pagerank as a “one way” link. When a site gives you a one way backlink, Google sees this as more of an “honest vote” for a good quality site. Getting a lot of reciprocal links is OK, it’s just that you should only link out to sites relevant to your website’s topic and be careful of what type of sites you choose.