Renaming your "links" lists

Most bloggers have a section on their blogs named "links" or "blogroll".



Those are standard issue terms for your...well...links and blogroll.



There is a reason to change those names, however.



It is thought, by many search engine watchers, that the dominant search engine Google may be discounting or even ignoring links pages. Whether that possibility applies to blogs is unknown.



The reason links pages on tradtional websites are losing their Google PageRank (Google's numerical measure of the importance of a website on the internet) is link exchanges. As we all know, link exchanges are a backbone of blogging. We don't want that valuable blogging tool discounted in any way.



Of course, we are not sure if Google has any concerns with the terms "links" and "blogroll" on blogs. No one is certain and Google isn't talking. Google never does.



I do know that at present, on the blogs that I have randomly checked, Google has counted the blog links as normal.



With the search engines constantly changing their algorithms (the mathematical calculation of where a webpage is positioned in the search results for the term entered into the search box), the possibilty of discounting and ignoring still looms.



What I have done, on all three of my blogs, is take a pro-active approach.



I have changed my "Links" to "Directory" and "Resources". Whether the change has had any real effect, I can't say for sure. I do know that Google counts my links, on all three of my blogs, with no problems.



If you change the term "links" to something else, it should prevent any ignoring of your links by the search engines. Because of the changing nature of blogrolling, I don't forsee a problem there for the forseeable future.



Besides, changing the name of your links list gives you a chance to be really creative, while preserving the power of your links.



That sounds like a great idea to me.