Many SEO experts and tech bloggers know about the Google penalties and recent algorithms. But most of them miss the core concept of link building schemes and off-page SEO. Many people don’t know the fact that Google is strictly against building unnatural links in your websites. Google is very strict about buying and selling links that pass PageRank to other websites. There are many websites which were completely banned out of Google for selling dofollow links in their blogs. When it comes to selling links, many people use blogrolls and site footers to pass PageRank and traffic to other blogs. This should be completely avoided, as Google took some harsh decisions to improve the quality of their search engine pages.

Let’s check out few basic steps to improve your site natural building and PageRank. All the techniques which I mention below are completely white hat, and might show a little impact on your traffic initially. Well, something is better than nothing. Lets get started.

Why Google is against Blogroll?

The answer is pretty simple. Google finds your website links to be unnatural and spam, when you start linking to random blogs and websites for no reason. Why would I link to any website? Well, the answer is to provide more information to the end user. A visitor who comes to your website should find more relevant content and links pointing to other websites (providing more value to his search/research). This would really save his/her time to find similar content in other websites for references.

But what we are doing? We are pointing links (paid, irrelevant) from our websites to other blogs for no reason. We are not adding any value to the people who visit our website and pass through the blogroll. This pisses of your readers and ultimately Google to punish your website for not adding any value.

What Type of Blogroll will Google Target?

Google knows which type of links are spammy, and which type of them are unnatural. Google can easily find out the number of back-links you generated to your blog from various sources, and most of them would be from various blogrolls and friendly link exchange. Make sure to avoid these below link building techniques in your blogroll.

Excessive Link Exchanging:

Blogroll is meant for excessive link exchange. It’s only to provide value to people, and please let it be like that. I get many mails from people who say, I have a website, www.example.com (PR 3) and I’m very much interested to exchange links via blogroll. So please link to me and I’ll link to you. You should just ignore these people, and start making your life more beautiful. Never get into excessive link exchanges in any part of your blogging, link building career.

Buying or Selling Links that Pass PageRank:

Your Blogroll should never buy or sell links to pass your PageRank. You might say how Google can differentiate a paid and friendly link. Don’t be stupid! They are the creators, so they know everything which you do. Never exchange money, goods, posts, free products for links, no matter how expensive they are.

Manipulating PageRank:

Your Blogroll should never link to web spammers or unrelated sites. Many web spammers intent to manipulate PageRank by sending huge number of blogroll links to their desired web address. This could be very costly if you are unaware of Google  webmaster guidelines.

Cross Linking:

Your blogroll should avoid cross linking, which is a strategy to create multiple domains owned by you to gain high search rankings and  PageRank. Search engines will find these cross links as relevant sites, and rank you better on their pages. If your evil link building strategies include cross linking, then please stay away from it.

What Kind of Blogroll Should I Have?

If you have a very good list of websites which can add value to your users, then keep using your Blogroll. But make sure the links are no-follow, and are not spammy. Being generous to pass PageRank to other websites will not add any value to your blog and its traffic. Be particular about passing PageRank to a friends blog initially, adding too many nofollow or dofollow friendly links can affect your site in future.

Since most of the blogroll links are dofollow, this clearly signals the Google spiders to crawl the blogroll links completely, and index them as quickly as possible. So take a control of your back-links and know where they are coming from. In my next article, I’ll show you how you can find out the most recent back links you generated from various blog/websites.

I hope you understood the important of blogroll in 2013. Google made sure that your website popularity doesn’t depend on the number of links it have. So remember the good words your mom told about trust and respect, and try to earn as much respect as possible from Google. Please leave your queries and comments in the below section.