Why you shouldn’t use Blogrolling.com
Buzz it
Java Script, Page Rank and Linking Explained:
The blog tip that I’m going to tell you here will get a lot of people’s dander up, but unfortunately sometimes you have to cruel to be kind. There are a lot of bloggers out there who use blogrolling.com and I cringe every time that I see it.
Now don’t get me wrong. Blogrolling is a great service. It makes it easy to add links to your favorite blog friends without having to mess very much with your templates and HTML. All you have to do is add a little script and voila - your blogroll appears like magic. To update just go into your blogrolling account and add the new links there. Very cool.
But unfortunately there is one major drawback - it doesn’t help the sites that you are linking to. What I’m talking about is pagerank with the search engines.
PageRank Explained:
| “The heart of our software is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools.PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.” |
When (for example) GoogleBot indexes your pages it can only understand ‘static’ content. That means JavaScript code is ignored and search engine bots can’t follow the links in your blogroll because they can’t see them. That sucks big time and BlogRolling uses javascript.
Improving pagerank is one of the primary benefits of blogrolling, so using javascript is self defeating so to speak.
There is another caveat that I should mention and it’s not limited to just blogrolling. It goes for all javascripts. Scripts slow down the loading of your web page. And when the service gets knocked out (as it will happen from time to time) your page can hang indefinitely. That’s not good for your visitors who will only give you a few seconds of their time before moving on to the next link.
So if you want to boost your pagerank (who doesn’t) and not offend your readers either, then use ordinary links in your template and chuck the javascript (and be sure to tell your friends too).
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Thanks for info. I never realized.
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bloglinker.com gives its users the same problem: javascript (see True Opinion). Just last week or so, thebloglinkexchange started up a PHP link service that you can configure to run manually or automatically.
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Thanks for the info Max. As you probably know blogspot users unfortunately can’t use PHP, but you are right that it is search engine friendly.
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But isn’t it true that if you view the page source that you will see the links are there?
Surely if the links are there in the source then SE’s should be able to index them.
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You hit the nail on the head Camzilla. When you view the source all you can see is the javascript code, and that is all that the search engine spiders can see as well. It kinda defeats one of the main benefits (page rank) of blogroll links don’t you think.
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What you see when you look at the source is pretty much what a Search Spider will see.
A great tool to really get a feel for this is Lynx, it is a little hard to use and requires some good ol’ DOS style knowledge, but it will show you the page in a text browser and you can get a real feel for why things on your page are showing up in a search engine the way they are.
LYNX Link
I thought I had a Blog Post about this, but, for the life of me I can not find it.
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Don’t worry about it cybercoder. I’m still looking for my coffee cup that I misplaced somewhere. Doh!
Thanks for the comments everyone.
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Nice tips for bloggers.
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interesting. It’s weird because Guy Kawasaki recommends blogrolling.com here:
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/04/the_120_day_won.html#axzz0XUvVaAIr
on tip number 4.
Your making a very valid point. I would want other bloggers to link to me to improve my page rank for sure. And i would want to help the page rank of those I link to.
thanks for the post.
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@Dave, I’m not surprised at all
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BLOGBloke (@blogbloketips) reply on November 22nd, 2009 3:54 am:
[…] not convinced? Pageranking and Link Love go hand-in-hand. According to Google: PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its […]
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@Dave, I'm not surprised at all
http://bit.ly/4NO4uv