Sebastian

Every new outgoing link lowers the power of all other links on a page.
Of course that doesn't lower your PageRank directly, just your
internal links pass less PageRank to your other pages. In theory
reciprocal links can keep the PageRank balance, because they give some
PageRank back. In real life however that's not going to work, because
both sides aren't identical, and they live in different environments.
Although it makes no sense: when you consider the theory only, the
concept is flawed, because due to the dampening factor you eliminate
PageRank with reciprocal links between two nodes.

So yes, having the blogroll on a dedicated page is a good idea,
because that saves screen real estate for stuff that's more useful,
for example lists of popular/related/... posts. Services like
Technorati which crawl only the main page and the feed ignore your
blogroll links then, but that's not really a drama.

Bear in mind that site-wide links pass another weight than editorial
links within posts. They might pass a portion of PageRank on every
page, or they might pass PageRank only once, and link juice is more
than just PageRank; what search engines actually do with your blogroll/
Ros/footer/... links depends on many parameters. Anyway, if you don't
know what you do (and obviously you don't) then don't bother with
PageRank sculpting (on blogs) and don't throw rel-nofollow like
confetti. Just make sure that you link enough to your most valuable
stuff to get these pages crawled and indexed, and promote it to
attract deep inbound links that keep them in the index.

Consider your blogroll a networking tool. It tells (blog) search
engines that's you're connected to your peers, and how. That's a
ranking factor. Maintain your blogroll with reputation in mind, put
blogroll links when you think that the other site is interesting for
your readers (regardless whether it's closely related or not), don't
be afraid to link out to your friends, family, business partners ...
and by all means don't think that the other site owes you a link back
when you blogroll it. Cyber sixty niners are worthless when used more
or less exclusively, and that goes especially for reciprocal links
that appear quite simultaneously.

The sort of link exchange you've in mind is a waste of resources.
Smart search engines nullify these links. For example at Google such a
link swap will not help with rankings, more likely it will raise a red
flag. Just link out to great places, then when you provide great
contents yourself, natural links will flow in. Some of them will be
reciprocal, but that's fine because natural reciprocal links do count
for rankings.

I'm not discussing Andy's article, just answering your question.

Sebastian

On Mar 3, 10:24 am, Mark S wrote: