Post Penguin and Panda are Blog Rolls Good or Bad for Ranking?

I have a news site which was hit with an unnatural link penalty. It didn't drop completely into cyberspace but it went from 8000 - 10000 hits per day to about 3500 -5000

The site is about 1300 posts of unique content that i put a lot of time and work into so I'm trying to be real careful not to f**k anything up even worse.

My question is regarding blog rolls. I have read that they are really bad, but then I've read the two way link exchanges have been effective. Anyone with any experience on this?

-Capp

One of my sites got hitted by penguing and unnatural link penalty, around 10%-15% of it links camed from high pr blog rolls, most of the blogs was general blogs and my site is niche targeted.... So I cant say if they hurt your site or not, but be careful and try to find only links from same niche (they look more natural).

Hi Bigg,

Blogroll shouldn't be an worry as long as it is relevant. But make sure you don't put too many under them and also make sure the contents you publish are about the recent stuff.

Hi keijo,

Penguin targeted on the websites which were trying to get over optimized for the business keywords alone. So when a website tries to build too many links for particular keyword then it will be hurt. So a solution to that will be keyword diversification and finding deep niche relevant keywords.

I have several websites which have a good percentage of links from Blogrolls. In the post penguin period, what I did is changed the anchor text variably while keeping some same. It didn't hurt that much. Try to vary anchor texts and you should be fine.

Blogrolls are not good .

Go with Contextual Links