I have been skipping around to my regularly scheduled blogs, trying to catch up on my reading. I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon…blogrolls seem to be disappearing, or at the least, stagnating. In the event that you haven’t heard the term before, a blogroll is that list of other blogs that generally runs down the side of the page. These are usually similar in topic, but sometimes are just other blogs recommended by the blogger.

And for quite a while, everyone’s goal was to find blogs with a higher page rank, but a similar topic and get them to link back to your blog. Thus giving your blog some juice and generating traffic from reader click-throughs. Really, this was most people’s plan for improved search ranking.

But that seems to have died off…and I suspect because bloggers have moved into the social media space and are finding new ways to let readers know of their great writings. It seems almost irrelevant to post links on your sidebar when you are sending your own links out across multiple microblogs with thousands of readers.

And maybe that’s the key…it has become more acceptable to self-promote. In fact, in most circles, it’s expected. By sending the links out yourself, you have greater control over what is shared and when…which gives you greater control over your blog marketing efforts. Maybe the blogroll will return to the days when it was used for no greater purpose than to identify really cool things to read…

This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 5:35 am and is filed under Blog Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.