If anyone wants to add my blog to their blogroll, I would appreciate it greatly!

I was precisely thinking about this and concluded that a list of links is not useful anymore. Either you provide more info, or is just cluttering your site.

So I created a plugin to build informative and useful blogrolls.

Now I am going to go through my blogroll and re-evaluate everything. I’ve noticed on blogs such as Steve Hodsons WinExtra, he has a sidebar container called My A-List of bloggers. For those that are regulars in the blogosphere, people assume A-List means high quality or highly valued. I found myself clicking on his own A-List of bloggers to check them out to see why he put them on his list.

I think I’m gonna follow Steve’s path and create my own A-List. These links will be sincere and because it says A-List, I think more people would be inclined to check out the list.

This site is one of those where I wouldn’t bother with the blogroll. I *might* click through a link mentioned in a post, but I probably wouldn’t even do that much.

I had to set up a new page template in WordPress to call the list and descriptions so that I wouldn’t have to write it manually, and it still needs more work to get get the presentation perfect, but I know that I have found many of the blogs I read through other people’s blogrolls. I think the blogs we read deserve some acknowledgement and appreciation. It’s not a small job, but for a blogger, it’s a job worth doing, and worth doing well.

There has also been a sustained boost in my traffic, which is good for me, but not my motivation. Links are for sharing what we find valuable, and for saying thank you to those who give value to us.

As I’ve said, we often make assumptions about what our readers need based upon our needs not theirs. Would your readers benefit more by you creating a blog post for each of those groups of links, explaining their value and why they should visit? Or is the blogroll enough?

We need to give value to our links no matter where we put them. And they need to value the reader not us. Our blogs are about us, but they are also about those who read, the more important viewers of our blogs.

IMHO, the best way to organize a blog roll is to divide it up into “sub categories.”

Example, on one of my space blogs, I noticed that my blog roll was heading towards the 100 link mark.

To make it easier for readers, I divided the blogs according to their type or focus. I listed the astronomy blogs in one section, those focused on Mars on another, corporate space blogs on another, etc.

This makes it much easier for people to find interesting sites, and makes it easier to exchange links as well (as long as they are quality sites).

I figure this way folks who click on the links will be gettiing something of value rather than just a long list of questionable content.

I am constantly updating my own blogroll. I use it to keep track of the blogs I read regularly. If a blogger stops posting or becomes uninteresting to me, I remove the blog from my list. I use sub-headers to keep track of what sort of blogs they are so if an interested someone else wants to know what kind of political blog or knitting blog I’m reading, they are welcome to do so easily. I also have a list of non-blog sites I visit that are important to me.

I also admit to having del.icio.us and digg widgets on my blogroll page. They’re really more for me. This way I can get to the most recently tagged links more easily because generally I’m either going to post about them or use them for some other reference.

But I am including a blogroll in my Giving Hands blog, and I am using the Random Link plugin to randomly pull 5 blogs on the main page.

This way, I will not intimidate my readers with a list of 50 links to other related blogs, and at the same time, I get to introduce to my readers some other blogs that they may find interesting :)

When it comes to blogrolls I think that quality is a far more important consideration than quantity.

If I’m reading a blog I enjoy, there’s a good chance I’ll click on links in their blogroll. I’m curious to know what they read.

But regardless of how few or many links they have, if the quality of the target sites is poor then I probably wont click on too many more of the links.

If the quality of the sites you link to is high then I may even click on every single one even if there are 50+ (like at http://www.creativereview.co.uk/crblog/).

So when doing a blogroll clean out I wouldn’t say “I’m only going to have 8 links” but “I’m only going to have high quality links”.