WordPress is said to be considering removing blogrolls from the newest version of their blogging platform. The proposal is that as of WordPress 3.5, blogrolls will be a plugin, rather than a basic feature. So, if a blogger wants to include links, for example in the sidebar, they will have to integrate them by installing the plugin and selecting where it should appear in the template.
Granted, for experienced WordPress users, this is hardly a big step – most serious bloggers already have quite a large list of plugins, and are accustomed to installing and maintaining them. However, there are a lot of beginner bloggers out there that simply use vanilla WordPress with a default theme, and when they upgrade, their links may vanish.
Such changes if made for Magento would not be so important as almost every E-Commerce user, in opposite to WP bloggers, anyway needs Magento support.
New users that start blogs after 3.5 comes out may never take the time to learn how to set up blogrolls, and this is bad news for online marketers that spend a lot of time and money building a base of quality, relevant links via blogrolls.
The reason behind the idea is unclear, however it could be that they are trying to stay ahead of resent Google’s search quality algorithm changes, some of which appear to penalize site-wide links. Perhaps WordPress believes that the blogroll feature is being abused, and that making blogs more “content focused” could be a good thing in the long term.
