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Are sidebar blogroll widgets going out of style?

by crenvy
4 replies
  • SEO
    • |
On another forum, someone made the claim that sidebar blogroll widgets on a blog will get you "in trouble" with Google. They claim this is true regardless if the links are natural or not. Their reasoning is that the links list shows up on every page/post of the blog, so the Google bot sees it as a scam.

I find this difficult to believe, especially for a blogger blog, which I have. My blogroll contains only links to other blog in my niche first of all. Secondly, since Blogger is google's, the blog template with sidebar is theirs, and the blogroll widget is theirs, shouldn't the bot be smart enough to realize that of course everything in the sidebar is repeated with each page/post?

I could create a separate page containing the blogroll, but it wouldn't be visible except as a link on the home page.
#blogroll #sidebar #style #widgets
  • Profile picture of the author nik0
    Banned
    I think it can lead to problems when you use exact anchor txt in such link in your sidebar.

    Blogroll links can still work great, but I would use your url as anchor txt instead.

    This whole anchor diversity thing is a bit weird though as I regularly still see people ranking very well with 80% of the exact same anchor txt from referring domains, not even talking about pages from the same site here.

    Google has a lot of quality signals so an anchor penalty will probably only get rewarded in case other flags were raised as well so can't even really call it an anchor penalty. Anyway it has very much to do with it so always better to be safe then sorry.
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  • Profile picture of the author micksss
    You can use a WP plugin "Simple Page Sidebar" to make it so your blogroll widget only shows up on certain pages so that it's not sitewide.
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  • Profile picture of the author nik0
    Banned
    Originally Posted by jacksarloks View Post

    A blogroll is just a list of links - Google may think those are paid links since many bloggers sell links and put them there, that's where problems can occur, so the guy who said that isn't totally wrong!

    Just don't put a title for widget like Sponsors or other text that give some hints they are paid links!

    Links showing up on every page has nothing to do with Google penalty or other stuff, links can show up anywhere. Penalty like I said occurs only if G think they're paid links!

    I would like those links on everypage just say something like:
    Jack Recommends
    or
    Favorite Blogs

    The best way is to use nofollow tag obviously that removes absolutely all problems you can have with G but if those links are link exchanges you can't do that.

    Jack
    We build links to rank, not to make them nofollow!
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