Written on February 11th, 2005 at 11:02 am by Darren Rowse
Outward Links - Good for Blogs?
Wayne at Blog Business World writes a good article on the value of outbound links in Search Engine Optimization. As he observes there are both pros and cons in linking to other sites from your blog that are worth considering as you think about SEO. I personally come down on the side of the argument that is pro outbound link. I don’t have the technological knowledge Wayne has to argue my case but from anecdotal evidence I’ve found the strategy has really helped my blogs to rise through the Search Engine Rankings.
Of course there are non SEO reasons for linking to others also which for me are more important - for me its more acknowledging that I am not an expert in every area relevant to this blog. I’m not going to pretend that I know everything there is to know - there are a lot of smarter bloggers out there and I want to point my readers in their direction. Make your links useful and relevant to the topic and you take another step to producing the kind of blog people will come back to on a daily basis. In the process you might just make a friend or two with those you link up to which is another side benefit of the strategy.
Anyway - let me link up to Wayne again and recommend that you head over there and check out his great post on Linking out is seeing the light for blogs.
5 Responses to “Outward Links - Good for Blogs?”
Tim
February 11th, 2005 12:41 pm
Yes, outbound links make you an “authority” on a topic. Just be careful not to give your competitors too many links.
Dane Carlson
February 12th, 2005 12:54 am
Tim, I disagree. I say link to everything relavent and valuable, no matter who owns it.
People read and visit my weblog for the outbound links. My site’s goal is to engage a reader and then to immediately send them elsewhere. I don’t think I’ve “lost” this reader in a convention sense. People are smart, they’ll go back to the sites that provide them with the best information relative to their interests.
Tim
February 12th, 2005 5:18 pm
Wait, I don’t think you understood my comment. I never mentioned anything about “losing a reader”.
I am simply talking about search engine optimization. Why help your competitor rank higher than you.
You have to read comments in context. Afterall, this article/post is about search engine optimization. ;)
Wayne Hurlbert
February 13th, 2005 4:26 am
One thing is certain. It’s impossible to contain all visitor traffic to your own business website. People visit other sites too. That is a given. Your competitor sites will be visited, so the onus is on the site owner to provide the best site possible, to retain the traffic. The way to do that is to provide value in the form of quality useful information.
On the issue of linking to competitors, and helping raise their sites in the search engine rankings, there is a theoretical case that linking to competitor sites enhances your own authority site status. While that concept is unproven, and based on anecdotal evidence, it does logically follow the theory of providing service to your visitor traffic.
In any case, by providing strong content, and adding incoming links, a site will rank well in the search engines anyway, and has nothing to fear. :-)
Tim
February 13th, 2005 12:52 pm
Yes, and I never said I was against linking to your competitors altogether, I just said “…be careful not to give your competitors too many links”. ;)
I am aware of the “authority” theory and I think it does make alot of sense.
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