This is a guest post by Alvina Lopez a freelance writer and blog junkie, who blogs about accredited online colleges. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: alvina.lopez @gmail.com.
Maintaining a blog can be difficult, especially when you have the pressure of coming up with creative, original, authoritative content that reaches out to an audience you hope to grow over time. While many bloggers focus obsessively on how search engines will rank their blogs, this hyper-focus often takes away from the quality of the actual content of your site.
Many SEO types and bloggers have said that having too many outbound links embedded in an article or page will ostensibly dilute your Page Rank. Conventional wisdom says that the key to winning the SEO game is to have as many inbound links as possible. While from a technical standpoint, you may think this is true, more thoroughly investigating this logic will reveal that outbound links are, in fact, a good thing and limiting them only limits the authority of your content.
Outbound Links From A Research Perspective
First, let’s take a look at limiting outbound links from a research perspective. When you write a blog post, you are likely attempting to purvey authoritative information about whatever niche or topic your blog covers. No matter how intelligent or original you may be, you will be using information in your post that you did not come up with yourself. As such, from a purely ethical standpoint, you should always cite or attribute any sources you used in composing your blog article. The easiest way to do so is through hyperlinks, so readers can quickly check your references and see for themselves whether your research is sound and authoritative.
Outbound Links For Fear Of An SEO Backlash
Another reason that you should not try to limit outbound links for fear of an SEO backlash is many of these fears are unjustified. Matt Cutts, a Google employee who is intimately acquainted with how search engines work, noted in a blog post that outbound links will hurt you if they link to irrelevant spam-like content, but, he says, “parts of [Google’s] system encourages links to good sites. In other words, if you are worried about how your blog will do on search engines, it pays to have good content that is supported by good links.
Perhaps the final thing to consider is that Internet readers love outbound links. Is this not part of what makes Wikipedia so popular? That you can look up anything you can think of and, unlike a traditional encyclopedia, you can learn beyond the immediate subject? You can travel far into the deep reaches of information and learn how everything connects? Hyperlinks have been part and parcel of the Internet since its infancy. As such, it makes no sense to limit links simply to boost your PageRank. Always put the quality of your content first.
About Eddie Gear
Thanks Eddie and Alvina for this learning opportunity about outbound links.
Yes, all the focus seems to be focused on inbound links at the moment. It is high time that someone actually addresses the outbound component. I think what you say makes sense. By providing good outbound links to readers we are really giving more outlets of information for our reader. In the long run, it will be beneficial to everyone.
Questions:
1) Are there certain type of outbound links that are better to link to?
2) What are the effects if many of your outbound links are tied to affiliate sales pages? Any SEO effects?
Cheers and I invite both of you to support Marc Linden blogging interview on my site. If you can help spread his wonderful story.
Cheers
There is one key principle that I follow to outbound links Jimmy. Relevance + Quality Content = Useful and Resourceful Outbound Link. Follow this and your readers would never get bored of those affiliate links. Its good to add a no follow link to an outbound link. I hope that answers your question.
Hi Alvina (and Eddie),
I completely agree when it comes to outbound links, and I have read the posts from Matt Cutts where he talked about outbound links will hurt your blog if they are to not relevant content. But, to me, when you add links to relevant and quality of high quality, that’s just brilliant. Because it shows me that you’re adding value and that you know what you’re talking about.
Exactly Jens, If you noticed that Alvina added a link that is 100 percent relevant to her article and I am sure that who ever clicked on it would benefited from it. I always believe that elevance + Quality Content = Useful and Resourceful Outbound Link.
Hi Alvina and Eddie,
I recently read a great article on this topic from my buddy Tim at BloggerJet.
He completely agrees and shows you why.
http://bloggerjet.com/3-reasons-youre-scared-to-link-to-fellow-bloggers/
Thanks Bryce. I missed that one out. I will check it right away. I’ve been busy with transition of the new role. I hope I get to read on posts that I’ve missed out.
Thank you Eddie for this wonderful idea about this outbound link, I don’t mind this in my blog/post only i know is to give my readers a quality and useful post that makes them get interested. Sometimes also i didn’t notice the page rank if is good to me or not.
A few outbound links never hurt your blog Elpidio. You often mark outbound links as no follow, so that should not affect your blogs PR.