Happy New Year
This is a sort of administrative post I guess. First of all, Happy New Year to everyone. I can’t possibly send email greetings to everyone I know any more, there are just too many of you, so I’ll assume if you’re a reader of this blog, you’ll hear it from me here.
Blogroll
The second thing is you may have noticed my blogroll disappeared again. If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll notice every once in a while I delete or completely rearrange it.
The problem is basically this. As a blogger I really put a lot of value in operating independently, speaking my own mind and not having any commercial influences. The reality is however, as free of commercial influences as I am, I’m hugely dependent on Google and other search engines for a large portion of my readership. Most people first encounter this blog in search engine results, and sometimes go on to become a regular reader. The more visible I am in search engine results, the more seriously people take this blog and the more it becomes a familiar name to them.
Search engines like Google count links and value of links when it decides how important a site is. If Google thinks I’m an important site, then when I link somewhere else it thinks this is unusually important too. In this way I am able to help other bloggers or websites improve their position in Google, and I see this as an important part of what I do. We all want to help make one another important. We all want what we feel is important to be more visible to others.
Unfortunately, all this ‘link love’ comes at a price. If I put up too many links, especially in my blogroll, search engines notice this and deduct ‘points’ from me. If you’re a smaller and less known site or if you have too many links yourself especially of a commercial nature, Google probably thinks you’re a low valued site, wonders why I’m linking to you and deducts even more points for my link to you.
Search Engine Optimization
I routinely do what’s called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. I’ve written some posts about this before, and if you search on Google you will find them. I make this blog more friendly for search engines.
I changed to a new domain name recently, bifurcatedcarrots.eu and at the same time changed the structure of my site a little. Part of the reason for doing this was SEO.
Anyway, it’s clear the next step in SEO is a blogroll cleanup.
I’ve removed the blogroll completely for now, and in the coming weeks and months I’ll be experimenting with returning some entries. Unfortunately, the entries most likely to come back are those of well established websites! It’s not that I’m too special to include links to smaller sites, or I prefer the big ones. In fact the opposite is true. I usually think the smaller more personal sites are more interesting to read, and I would prefer to promote them.
I’m sorry if I end up deleting your entry in my blogroll. I’ll try to make up for it a bit by mentioning more blogs in posts. To the extent I think I can within the guidelines of SEO, I’ll try to put back some of the entries over time.
As unfriendly and cold as this advice might seem, if you want to make it more likely I will put you in my blogroll, you need to do SEO yourself and get other bloggers to link to you first. You have to become important, before I can help make you important! If you have any questions about this, please send an email and I’ll try to offer some more suggestions specific to your situation.
