Thursday, May 25, 2006

[General] Links Lists

Can anyone more knowledgeable than I comment on the pros and cons of having long lists of links in your sidebar?

The sidebar at my tea site has a long list of merchants I've mentioned, a slightly less long list of other tea blogs and a few shorter lists. I was thinking of giving each of these lists their own page and just linking to them from the sidebar.

This Post was written by Bill from Tea Guy Speaks.

4 comments:

Tery Spataro said...

I'm taking off my food blogging hat and putting on my Marketing Consulting hat: Are any the merchants you link linking back to you? If so that's a huge plus, it helps push you higher in search engines, also builds your credibility. If not, are you getting compensated for referral?

Cybele said...

I have a very small blogroll on my main page. I link in the context of my posts whenever possible to both businesses and other blogs.

To accomodate everything else I made a links page.

You also might consider doing "featured links of the month" to draw attention to your lists as an additional content feature.

Sam said...

I guess having blog rolls is kind of the 'done thing' in a blogging circles, but by no means does everybody do it.

It seems to make sense to me that if you have a tea blog you might want to link to a bunch of other tea blogs you like.

My problem is I want to link to just about everyone in the world which gets messy and impossible to keep up to date so the drop down menues do help.

The long and short of it is you shouldn't feel obliged to link to anyone. Especially commercial places (do you want to give them free advertising?) - its entirely up to YOU and what YOU want/like to do.

I dont think there are any hard and fast rules


sam

kiplog said...

Sam's right, as someone who actually tries to link to everyone (at least every food blogger) it gets out of hand fast.

If you focus on a speciic subject, like tea, it's more manageable, and sometimes worth the traffic you'll get as a worthwhile source on that subject. before long you can dictate terms to the commercial links, or at least get some free tea.