06-29-2005
Outbound Links and SEO
Wayne Hulbert has written a great guest blogging post over at Problogger entitled Blogs, Links and SEO. In it he talks about something that doesn’t get as much attention as it should, and that’s the power of linking when it comes to blogs.
I’ve often heard people talking about being careful with your links out, because you don’t want to “leak” PageRank from your important pages. This has not proven to be the case in any of my sites. For one thing, I don’t think that linking out depletes your own PR. It might deplete the value of the PR that the site you’re linking to will get via your link, but other than that, doing things like using the no-follow tag really doesn’t make much sense.
For me, blogs are proof of this. Go to any high-ranking blog, and what do you see? That’s right. Links, links and more links.
Wayne writes:
“There is some evidence that linking out to other blogs helps gain search rankings for the generous blogger. Instead of being a drain, linking out can result in a net SEO gain. Now beat that for great karma!”
Sounds good to me.
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June 30th, 2005 at 7:07 am
BJ that’s great if that is really how it works. I would imagine thought that there would be some sort of check to make sure the target site is related. Also the number of links otherwise you could just link to everything.
June 30th, 2005 at 10:45 am
Allan, the theme of the target site probably is relevant, but I would hazard a guess that it has to be relevant to the theme of the post itself, and not the theme of the blog as a whole. There are many “A-list” bloggers who do post about things that are off topic to their particular field and the general theme of their blogs.
I imagine that the content of the post in which you’re displaying the links is also a factor - a post that is nothing but links probably doesn’t look that great to the SEs, if for no other reason than the fact that it is harder to determine the relevance of the links.
So overall, I think that being a “generous blogger” and writing good content that includes links to relevant pages off your own site is a good thing to do.
August 18th, 2005 at 3:48 pm
Yes, I also believe that google PR does not depend fully on the outbound links. But inbound links are most important anyway.