How to Have Your Blogroll Show on Your Home Page Only

For those of you running WordPress with a blogroll in your sidebar, you might want to set up your blogroll to show on your home page only. Why? There are two good reasons: it’s better for you and it’s better for the sites listed in your blogroll. It’s better for you because it minimizes PageRank bleeding. Unless they carry the nofollow tag, all links pass along some of your PageRank to whatever page is being linked to. Having your blogroll appear on every page of your website only increases the number of offsite links which you are giving PageRank to. If you have five sites in your blogroll and 100 pages on your site, that makes 500 links which could be draining your PageRank. By having your blogroll show on your home page only, that number would be reduced from 500 to just five.

It’s also better for the sites listed in your blogroll. Using the previous example, each site listed in your blogroll would receive 500 inbound links from your site not counting any links you might give them in your content. This just isn’t natural and Google realizes this. What reason would there be to link to another site 500 times? None really, and this is why the search engines have begun to devalue site wide links (those that appear on every page of your site). By having your blogroll show only on the home page, each site in your blogroll will receive just one link, but it will be considered a higher quality link by the search engines and will likely be coming from the page on your website with the highest PageRank, your home page.

Placing the blogroll on your home page only is simple to do in WordPress. All you need to do is edit your sidebar code by replacing your blogroll code with the following:

<?php if (is_home()) { ?>
<?php wp_list_bookmarks();  ?>
<?php } ?>

Now your blogroll will only show on your home page, you will minimize your PageRank bleeding and the websites you are linking to will receive higher quality links from you.