HTML Link Building Using Excel
October 26, 2008 • JP • No Comments • Rate This Article
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While building a link list for my blogroll page (see Blogs I Read), I needed a way to create the list of links. The prospect of building all of the links by hand is pretty exhausting (yes, even the thought), so why not leverage Excel's capabilities?
First I took a list of the links and put them in a worksheet in column A. Then I put the site name in column B. Here is the formula to create the link:
Yes, I nofollow external links (except in comments).
This technique could be very useful, if you have a list of websites and want to turn them into HTML links, just paste in the above formula and adjust the cell references. I created a sample with the sites from that page and the formula filled down to create the links.
FYI – I finally upgraded WordPress to 2.6.3, there's a fantastic plugin I found that does it automatically. If you aren't running the latest version, this plugin makes it very easy.
–JP
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WordPress has the capability to build a blogroll list. I took the PHP out of the sidebar ans stuck it into the body of a page, did a little formatting (very little), and it was done. No need to build links in another application. I don't know if it does nofollow, but I pretty much let links get followed anyway. I may change this if I read up on SEO and find it makes much difference.
My theme doesn't support widgets, and I don't feel like finding one that does (or trying to fix it), so I have to build the list by hand. And this is one area where I don't mind doing things (at least partially) manually, because the list comes from FeedDemon (my newsreader). When I paste PHP into a page, it just echoes the code to the screen, i.e. it doesn't actually execute. How do you do it?
The nofollow thing is really to keep your blog juice. It instructs the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) to not consider the link to be a 'vote' for that page.
So for those sites (like Wikipedia) that sponge your Pagerank by nofollowing your links, you can do it back to them by not giving them any link credit.
I remove it in the comments only, so that repeat commenters (i.e. the people adding value to your blog) are "rewarded" with a link to their blog that the spiders will follow.
So comment away
No widgets necessary, it's straight php. I found the php in the sidebar that listed the links (blogs), and pasted it into the html behind a plain page.
Thank you for this posting. I was stuck with a problem in my formula and this post solved my problem.
Thank you!