I am certainly finding these “Five” series of posts very educational. There has been such great discussions around each one and I am learning a lot from all of the experience of the visitors here at the site. I appreciate your willingness to speak up about what your likes and dislikes. There is nothing like a spirited conversation and sharing of information to get the brain juices flowing.
So our “Five” for this post is blogroll related plugins for your website.
Feed Reading Blogroll – This plugin uses Googles index of feeds to grab the latest post date and title and display it on your blogroll. There are several configuration options and it can organize the presentation of the blogroll links in order of the freshness of the latest post. You will need a free Google API key to use this plugin.
Nofollow Blogroll SEO – This simple plugin puts rel="nofollow" on non-homepage Blogroll Links. It allows you to share links with your favorite sites but not take a hit in your SEO for having sitewide links. This is a fairly new plugin in the development cycle but due to its simplicity is not likely to require a lot of development down the road.
Better Blogroll – Collecting a lot of links in your blogroll to the point they take up an entire sidebar? Well this plugin is the solution to that problem. It allows you to specify a specific number of blogroll links to display in your sidebar and then it randomly fills that from your entire collection of blogroll links. So it keeps things fresh and shares the link love! This has several other features that just give added benefits to the plugin such as image links, displaying the links category and setting links to no follow. This is one of the more popular ones with almost 9,400 downloads to date.
Advanced Blogroll – This plugin allows you to display your blogroll links by category; order them by name, link ID or randomly; display with text links only, graphics only or both; select how many links to show and also opt to add the no follow attribute to the links.
Google Reader Blogroll Widget – This one lets you grab your Google Reader subscription and display it in your sidebar as a blogroll – you can even use the custom Google color schemes in your sidebar display for it.
I look forward to seeing what you use for blogrolls in the comments. Thanks and stay safe out there on the net!
I have used the advanced blogroll plugin and this is just an awesome plugin. Easy to use and setup and with many features.
I think I will have a look at feed reading blogroll plugin, looks interesting.
I’ve tested some of them but the best plugin… was to put some code from the WP Codex to get what I wanted exactly…
I use Advanced Blogroll on one site and it’s great, should be built into WP imo.
Good post, thanks. I’ve been thinking about adding a blogroll for ages, but a simple list seemed a bit lame.
I might download one of these soon. 🙂
Thanks for this. Just what I wanted as I am migrating a blog from blogger to WordPress.
Blogger has a nice blogroll option where you can have an excerpt of the latest blog post from each and of your blogrolled blogs and displays in order of most recent post.
@Rob: If you like this feature, you need the Feed Reading Blogroll. It will add the same Blogroll to any WordPress blog.
Thanks Jan,
My first time replying to a threaded comment too !
Isn’t WP brilliant !
Thank you for the fine tuning plugins related to this very specific purpose, worth taking a look!
James
http://twitter.com/AskJamesHolmes
Good article, I know this from my wp dashboard when I want to post an article. Very useful for everybody, thanks.
mg12’s Wp-MulticolLinks would’ve also been a good mention, it’s really usefull
I really, really, really, can not stress enough how much I hate things like the no follow blogroll plug-in. It is terribly dishonest as most people do not know to check for it; so sites using this plugin will get value from friends on their blogroll and their “friends” think they are getting a reciprical link. They visibily see it as well, with no idea that they are getting zero SEO value from the link. If you only use high quality and relevant links in your blogroll this would not be an issue and you would not lose any SEO value by giving a little link love to your friends.
I post my blogroll on a separate page it is quite long and so it works better that way. I’d like a plugin that lets me feature only a few specifically chosen links from the blogroll at any given time.
It’s also be nice to have some kind of widget that allows you to post on a sEperate page your google feeds.
That is a little much to ask but it is what I’d like.
Cooper,
I am looking to add my blogroll to a seperate page. How did you set yours up?
Thanks so much. I was looking for reviews regarding this topic.
Better blog roll would be my all times favorite – I wonder why wordpress itself didn’t think of that.