Blog Sidebar Archives by Month

[punchtheclock]

What are your opinions about having an archive list by month in a blog's sidebar. This seems like it is relatively useless to most readers, especially when there are archives by by subject.

As far as SEO...most of these articles are getting fed link juice already through the subject archives (strategy, poker stories etc...and I guess it would be fair to say that the internal link relevancy might be a little better from a subject archive vs. a chronological archive.

But...a lot of the successful blogs seem to have archives my month...so, what does everyone think? Do you nofollow 1 set of archives perhaps?

[Sebastien]

I usually avoid having links to the archives on the sidebar...

I see it this way => the less outgoing links a page has, the more these links are going to be worth in the eyes of Google.

But - It also depends on how much value these links have for your users. If they are reading a blog of a high stakes pro like Sbrugby, the archives are a huge plus. People like to see how player's results evolve through time.

If you have a strategy blog and the time factor is absolutely irrelevant, then get rid of the links to the archives IMO. They are just an obstacle to proper internal linking.

[completepokerrules]

From a usability standpoint I don't think they have any value to the visitor. Category navigation is paramount and the ability to search is key too. But date based nav is pointless in my opinion.

You can use the Meta Robots plugin (for Wordpress) to disable the indexing of the date based pages among other things (like wp-admin login page, author archives, etc).

http://yoast.com/wordpress/meta-robo...dpress-plugin/

[PokerDapyx]

It's better to bring to the visitors only the links that he might be interested, and the spiders will come along.

[Randy]

It depends on the nature of the blog. Suppose you have a blog where you're chronicling your attempt to take $20 and build it up to $10,000 playing poker. That's a chronologically-significant type of content, so those monthly archive links would be useful for a visitor. A blog about the history of the legality of online poker would also be useful to have in chronological order.

But most blogs I've seen are really static websites in disguise. In those cases archives are useless.

Blogs are about a two things:

1. Initiating conversations with others. (That's why blogs have a comments field. The reason blogs are different from forums is because only the blogger(s) can initiate a thread.)

2. Doing something where chronology matters. Blog posts are dated and in a certain order for a reason.

If you're not doing one of those 2 things (or both), then you'd probably be better off with a static site anyway.