In WordPress 2.0.x there was a simple facility to bulk change the link categories for numbers of links. Unless I’m mistaken, that appears to have been dropped from 2.1.x.

I’ve just imported 52 links to what’s now called the Blogroll (it used to be “œLinks”) and have had to add the link category individually to each one. To say that’s time-consuming is an understatement, especially if you have lots of sites to do.

This question comes from John Evans who outlined the problem is greater details over at Syntagma.

First of all, welcome to the club, John. You’re not the first person to encounter this problem and unfortunately, you won’t be the last.

Depending on how many blogroll links you actually employ, your solution may be the easiest and quickest. However, if you have LOTS of blogroll categories and the upgrade from WordPress <2.0.x to WordPress >2.1 did not make the proper associations, you may not have as much luck. I discourage manual editing of the database in this case because there are multiple lines of logic and different fields that would have to be updated.

The good news is that as of this afternoon, I submitted new functionality for consideration in the WP core that would address this issue. The bad news is that this might not make the WP 2.2 release on April 23. If you feel comfortable applying your own patches, feel free and let me know how it goes.