I have noticed a subtle issue with blogrolls that people may not realize, but it makes it harder to know who is linking to you. The issue is that any site using Bloglines or Blogrolling, or any other service that uses Javascript to display a list of links, will not have those links registered on Google, Technorati, Truth Laid Bear, or any other blog linking engine.

The reason? Javascript runs on the client, meaning the client must know how to execute the language. The server sends the instructions in the form of Javascript, and browsers know what to do with those instructions so when you go to the web site in a browser you see the list of links. However, if you view the same site from the eyes of a spider or bot, you see the javascript source code and no links. You can see what I mean if you view the source of the page.

I wondered why the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem wasn’t finding links that I knew existed. Now I know why.

To solve the problem I now use PHP instead of Javascript to display the blogrolls. The change is simple as long as your server supports PHP. Instead of pasting in the Javascript code you just put the URL provided for PHP inside a readfile() function call, like so.

<?php @readfile( "http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?html=1blahblahblah" ); ?>
<?php @readfile( "http://rpc.blogrolling.com/display_raw.php?blahblahblah" ); ?>

(The @ sign on the front is to silently ignore any errors.)