I joined Blogging Chicks about a month ago. Blogging Chicks is a very large blog network, and when you join it, your link gets added to the blogroll that's mandatory on all members' blogs. When I say that I "joined" I mean that I emailed the owner on September 22 asking for the code to put her blogroll on the sidebar of this blog. She sent me the code on October 18, and I added it over there on the right, aware that it might even be "a few weeks" before I got added to the list. I didn't think about it too much, but periodically I would check it and notice that I wasn't on it yet. Well, whatever; we're all busy, right?
The reason I joined Blogging Chicks was to improve my site's ranking on things like Google's PageRank and TTLB. I suppose I could say it was to make friends, to find cool new blogs, to belong in a more meaningful way to the blogosphere, etc. But mostly, it was to boost my linkage. Today, I took that blogroll off my blog for two reasons. One was that I went and checked out the Blogging Chicks site, and the owner has announced that due to school pressures she won't be adding anyone until the 16th of December. The other was because I checked out the page rank of some of the sites on the blogroll, and they're not better than mine. I don't need help to get a page rank of 3. In fact, having a wagonload of outgoing links can actually harm your ranking with some engines.
I know a lot of blogs that have what looks like thousands of links, both via blogrolls and also in handmade lists. I wonder how valuable some of these mega-blogrolls really are. I think I'm done with the big blogrolls, for now. I mean the ones that are generated by a third party and then called up by a script to appear on all the member blogs. On the other hand, I am going to work on my links list and develop a handmade blogroll of sites that I visit regularly, as well as those that link to me. I appreciate and reciprocate links, and I want to work on that aspect of this site. Now that I have a functional site index, I need a good links list.
The reason I joined Blogging Chicks was to improve my site's ranking on things like Google's PageRank and TTLB. I suppose I could say it was to make friends, to find cool new blogs, to belong in a more meaningful way to the blogosphere, etc. But mostly, it was to boost my linkage. Today, I took that blogroll off my blog for two reasons. One was that I went and checked out the Blogging Chicks site, and the owner has announced that due to school pressures she won't be adding anyone until the 16th of December. The other was because I checked out the page rank of some of the sites on the blogroll, and they're not better than mine. I don't need help to get a page rank of 3. In fact, having a wagonload of outgoing links can actually harm your ranking with some engines.
I know a lot of blogs that have what looks like thousands of links, both via blogrolls and also in handmade lists. I wonder how valuable some of these mega-blogrolls really are. I think I'm done with the big blogrolls, for now. I mean the ones that are generated by a third party and then called up by a script to appear on all the member blogs. On the other hand, I am going to work on my links list and develop a handmade blogroll of sites that I visit regularly, as well as those that link to me. I appreciate and reciprocate links, and I want to work on that aspect of this site. Now that I have a functional site index, I need a good links list.
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