How to Start a Blogroll: A Step-by-Step Training for New Bloggers
Recent Trends
Blogrolls, once a standard sidebar feature in the early blogosphere, have experienced a quiet revival among niche content creators. Many new bloggers now treat curated link lists as a way to signal community membership and to offer readers a trusted resource path. Plugin developers have responded with lightweight widgets that allow filtering by category, last-updated date, or manual curation, reducing the friction of maintaining static lists.
Background
The practice originated in the late 1990s and early 2000s when bloggers would exchange links to build visibility and create a distributed network of related voices. As social media and algorithm-driven discovery tools grew, blogrolls declined in prominence. Recent shifts toward independent publishing and skepticism of platform algorithms have led some bloggers to revive the practice as a deliberate editorial choice rather than a default sidebar element.
User Concerns
- Aesthetic clutter: New bloggers worry that a blogroll will look dated or distract from primary content.
- Reciprocity pressure: Uncertainty about whether inclusion should require a return link or whether to link to larger competitors.
- Maintenance burden: Fear that links will break, blogs will go dormant, or the list will become outdated without regular updates.
- Traffic leakage: Concern that sending visitors away will reduce page views and engagement metrics.
Likely Impact
When executed thoughtfully, a blogroll can foster a sense of belonging within a specific topic ecosystem. It may improve on-page time if readers treat the list as a discovery menu. Search engines may interpret curated outbound links as editorial recommendations, though the effect is likely modest. Conversely, a neglected or overloaded blogroll can reduce trust and signal that the site is not actively maintained.
What to Watch Next
- Curation tools: Look for plugins that automatically check link health and surface recently active blogs.
- Contextual placement: Some bloggers are experimenting with in-post blogrolls rather than fixed sidebars, tying each link list to a specific article topic.
- Integration with newsletters: A growing number of bloggers are embedding small blogrolls in their email digests as a cross-promotion tactic.
- Reciprocal network signals: Watch for markers that indicate whether blogroll links actually drive referral traffic, as that will influence adoption rates among new bloggers.