You may have noticed that my links have disappeared from my sidebar. Don’t worry if you were among them, they have simply been moved to a single page for a couple of reasons:
1. Like an awful lot of blogs, the list was beginning to grow, and the sidebar was getting too long, and somewhat unwieldy.
2. Learning more about Googles unfavourable view of ‘duplicate content’ especially where links are concerned, I’d rather reduce it to only appearing on a single page, rather than for every time the sidebar is generated.
To neaten the appearance of the links page, I used the Categorical Links Page plugin, which generates the link list anywhere you drop the relevant syntax onto the page. It also has the added benefit of showing the alt-text about the links, usually only available if you hover the mouse over the link.
Thanks to Andy Beard for his interesting and essential blog, which informed me about the situation in ’2.’ I’ll keep the Top Commenters plugin for now, but I concede the point, and if I ever get round to learning a bit more about PHP I’ll edit my theme’s single page file in the way he suggests. 
How do you control your blogroll?
13 users commented in " Clean Up Your Blogroll "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackThe theme you are using does actually have a single.php
Unfortunately it includes the same 2 sidebars as used on the front page.
That isn’t as bad as it could be, for instance you could easily create /sidebar3.php and /sidebar4.php
Unfortunately they show the sidebars first within the code of your pages, which isn’t ideal for SEO either.
p.s. if you change that link to a link to the blog post you read, you will get a pingback, which might give you a little traffic, but it will also give you a backlink because I use the dofollow plugin.
Chris, I’m no expert but there’s a specific code that works in my template.
Don’t know it’ll work for yours..
—insert content/html/otherstuff—
I’ve always been wanting to set up my link page differently.. maybe I’ll get started now
Jim Boykin has an article on the best SEO for link pages..
Link Pages are Dead – Long Live Content Pages.
Andy.. if you’re reading this.. any thoughts?
Oops.. looks like the code didn’t show up. Nevermind then..
I don’t agree that Google penalizes for duplicate content when it comes to hyperlinks. Other content, yes, but not links. Penalizing for the “other” content is to prevent splogs and cut-n-paste programs from gaining over legitimate, original content.
I thought about a different page and instead settled on wrapping the blogroll, among other widgets, in a scrollbox. It seems to work just fine, people are navigating it without complaint.
Damn. That was SUPPOSED to say cut-n-paste. Fat fingers have I.
Damn and my name is spelled wrong. Twice! I wish we could edit our own comments. If I had half a brain, I’d make a plugin for that.
Thanks Andy, I’ve altered the URL, I don’t know why I didn’t do that in the first place. What’s wrong with the sidebars appearing first? I’m not obsessed with these matters, but if it’s easy to fix, I’ll have a go.
I’ll check that link out, thanks Maki. Mail me the code if you want, and I’ll insert it into the bottom of the post.
I’ve fixed your typos RT, so now you just look like you’re talking to yourself
How do you do that scrollbox thingy then? And why? Want to contribute an article?
My code didn’t appear either although I did wrap it in code tags.
I am not sure how easy it would be to get the sidebars appearing last.
How important is it? Who knows? It is one of the factors believed to affect search engines – I have seen people do tests to determine whether more weighting is given to links appearing early on a page.
Maki that post of Jims is actually very similar to what I have discussed in my Speed Linking Slow Linking post a while ago. People writing speed linking posts effectively are creating poor quality links pages.
There isn’t a duplicate content penalty as such unless it is an extreme case, the search engines choose which pages are most relevant for a particular search result.
Thus is the pages are in the index, the links count. I think I need to do another post to explain my milk bottle analogy a little better.
Its always better to use a page for all your links rather than blogroll.Just one reason SEO.Good point.
I am happy that my cc site has a page for links and I am trying to keep that one fairly short.
However, I have a billion bookmarks in del.icio.us.
I do need a plug in for WCW though…the member directory is too long and growing.
Hi Ashish!
This plugin’s excellent, and very easy to setup Crunchy.
My blogroll is also getting quite large , so i am also going to follow your advice .
[...] a list of blogs stored somewhere. Maybe a blog roll, even though they can have SEO implications, and, especially if it’s a new blog to me or if they are particularly controversial, I may [...]
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