Setting Up your Sports Blog Roll

For those of you that are setting up new blogs and are not sure what to do with your Blog Roll here are some ideas to keep in mind.

1. Put Blogs in your Blogroll that may link back to you.  If you are starting an Eagles blog, link up a bunch of eagles blogs and email them to let them know you put them in your blog roll.  Because you are new, you may get 1 link, 5 links, or no links.  It will really just depend on whether they like your blog and think you are here to stay

2. Don’t link blogs up that you probably won’t get a link from: A perfect example is the 1000s of blogs that link to Deadspin without getting anything in return.  Yes, if you get one link from Deadspin, it will get you a ton of traffic but don’t put them in your blog roll until you get that link.

3. Trade links with sites that have equal to or hire page rank: If your site is a PR (Page Rank) 3 and you are linking out to 10 blogs that have PR 0, 10 blogs that are PR1, and 10 blogs that are PR2, those links could actually be hurting you.  To combat this make sure you are getting a link back from every site that has a lower PR then you and try to get links from as many sites as you can that have a higher PR then your site.

4. Don’t link to ESPN and any other major network sites: This kind of goes along the same lines as #2.  Keep in mind that your readers already know these sites so you are basically providing useless links that could possibly hurt your pagerank.

5. If your Blog Roll goes over 60 links, you may want to thinking about making it a separate page:  Under Google’s Webmaster Guidelines that don’t like to see more then 100 links on a page and your front page can easily have 40 or 50 links that aren’t your Blog Roll.