Wednesday, October 08, 2008 at 12:20 AM
Creating outbound links on your site, or "linking out", is our topic for Day 3 of Links Week. Linking out happens naturally, and for most webmasters, it's not something you have to worry about. Nonetheless, in case you're interested about an otherwise simple topic that's fundamental to the web, here's the good, the bad, and answers to more advanced questions asked by our fellow webmasters. First, let's start with the good...
Relevant outbound links can help your visitors.
The bad: Unmonitored (especially user-generated) links and undisclosed paid advertising outbound links can reduce your site's credibility.
When linking out, am I sending visitors away forever?!
Relevant outbound links can help your visitors.
- Provide your readers in-depth information about similar topics
- Offer readers your unique commentary on existing resources
- Show that you've done your research and have expertise in the subject manner
- Make visitors want to come back for more analysis on future topics
- Build relationships with other domain experts (e.g. sending visitors can get you on the radar of other successful bloggers and begin a business relationship)
The bad: Unmonitored (especially user-generated) links and undisclosed paid advertising outbound links can reduce your site's credibility.
- Including too many links on one page confuses visitors (we usually encourage webmasters to not have much more than 100 links per page)
- Hurts your credibility—turns off savvy visitors and reduces your authority with search engines. If you accept payment for outbound links, it's best to rel="nofollow" them or otherwise ensure that they don't pass PageRank for search engines. (As a user, I prefer to see disclosure to maintain my loyalty as well.)
- Allows comment spam, which provides little benefit for users. Also, from a search engine perspective, comment spam can connect your site with bad neighborhoods instead of legitimate resources. Webmasters often add the nofollow attribute (<rel="nofollow">) to links that are user generated, such as spammable blog comments, unless the comments are responsibly reviewed and thus vouched for.
See Jason Morrison's recent blog post about keeping comment spam off your site to prevent spam in the first place.
When linking out, am I sending visitors away forever?!
Hmmm... visitors may initially leave your site to check out relevant information. But can you recall your behavior on sites that link to good articles outside their domain? Personally, I always come back to sites I feel provide commentary and additional resources. Sometimes I stay on the original site and just open up the interesting link in a different tab. It's likely that with relevant outbound links you'll gain repeat visitors, and you won't lose them forever.Yesterday's post mentioned that descriptive anchor text is helpful in internal links. Is it still important for outbound links?
Descriptive anchor text (the visible text in a hyperlink) helps accurately inter-connect the web. It allows both users and Googlebot to better understand what they're likely to find when following a link to another page. So if it's not too much trouble, try making anchor text descriptive.Should I worry about the sites I choose to link to? What if their PageRank may be lower than mine?
If you're linking to content you believe your users will enjoy, then please don't worry about the site's perceived PageRank. As a webmaster, the things to be wary of regarding outbound links are listed above, such as losing credibility by linking to spammy sites. Otherwise, consider outbound links as a common sense way to provide more value to your users, not a complicated formula.
25 comments:
What if you are an industry leader and are worried about the implications of linking to your direct competitors as a source of information. This is the ideal solution for the user because we could send them to the exact same relevant page on our competitors portal to compare and contrast reviews. Maybe not the ideal solution for Google as we're reducing the users interaction with your portal/ad delivery. The worry internally would be that if our competitors didn't link back we'd be improving their authority in the field even further, with the potential to outrank us...maybe nofollow? or wouldn't you see that as a valid reason for doing so?
Hi I'm the webmaster of web-tool.ws.
I'm planning to change the site content.
Can i use some of your content?
Oh, buddy, you just opened a can of worms! I'll be polite here and keep this short, but you can bet this topic is going to have some strong opinions coming from the blogsphere.
Let's just say that, as much as I love most of what Google does, who died and made Google the Internet police? Isn't Google's primary function that of INDEXING websites? NOT dictating what should be published on them!
I won't pull at this thread too hard right now, but this will be interesting discussion, for sure!
BTW... The antiquated HTML 4.01 tag limitation in this blog is ridiculous! What happened to xHTML? The better HTML!
Can you shed some light on how google treats links within Javascript? It seems that those links are sometimes crawled and sometimes not.
Hey JMorris; you are speaking for the SEO blogosphere when stating something like that. Those of us with true common sense understand what the OP is saying. It's well, erm, hmm, all about common sense and has nothing to do with G policing the web at all. sheesh; is this stuff getting real tiring.
Doug,
No, I'm not just talking about the SEO blogsphere. I'm talking the Internet in general. I'm talking about the principle of a service that is suppose to index and catalog now dictating that I have to go through extra effort to inform them of certain links by abusing a standard. Yet their remains a double standard that big corporations can still have those same types of links without abusing the standard, yet Google does not de-index them or slap their PR.
This has nothing to do with what industry your in. This has everything to do with the fact that Google is making webmasters put in extra work because Google doesn't want to fix a broken algorithm.
If Google's search algorithm is so great, so contextually accurate, why in the world can it not discern a sponsored link from a not-sponsored link from the context of the link? Furthermore, why should I have to abuse a standard, that was designed to fight spam, to tell Google what value a link has? why not just ask to include "Sponsored Message" in the title of the page or "Sponsor:..." in the title="" attribute of the link?
I'm fundamentally, and quite adamantly against Google's revised link policies and it's not just professional bloggers or SEOs that are against it. It's just that most people don't have the intestinal fortitude to step up and say something because they make most of their money from Google traffic.
Well, I play like Google doesn't exist and I don't make much at all from Google and I don't care! 90% of my traffic comes from other sites, not Google and it surely isn't because I don't rank well, because I do, on many terms.
I call BS when I see it. I love most of what Google does and I promote them extensively, but I call BS on their link policy.
You are fairly animate for someone who doesn't play like Google exists.
"Well, I play like Google doesn't exist and I don't make much at all from Google and I don't care! 90% of my traffic comes from other sites, not Google and it surely isn't because I don't rank well, because I do, on many terms."
If that's indeed the case, then you should have no problem with the common sense stuff written by Google. Can of worms? I don't think so. Only a can of worms if you constantly are concerned each day you wake up in the morning, wondering if sites are now penalized or not.
Doug,
It's not my sites I'm worried about. It's the sites of those who don't know to check Google's policies every so often. The sites of those who do not follow the search industry. The sites of ma and pa kettle who just setup their first shop on the interwebs and was offered good money from a nice man to put a little link on their site.
Think it doesn't happen, think again.
If you want to jump to Google's defense, that's fine, but you're barking up the wrong tree. My "beef" with Google isn't because of me, it's because Google policy hurts those who don't know any better and it because abuses a standard.
I'm sure if you step away and think about it, you'll see my point. Common sense to you and me is NOT common sense to those who can barely use GMail and wouldn't have a clue about Google's policies, yet have a small business site online.
I've built many sites for small, local businesses and I can assure you from years of experience, most people don't have a clue what Google's policies are. When you try to explain it to them, many glaze over with the deer in the headlights look.
Don't make ma and pa study something they really don't need to know. Fix the damn algorithm to account for the context of the link!
Oh, I see both sides real clearly. I followed the ethical threads... both of them. IMO Danny Sullivan didn't go far enough..not even close. He didn't out the firm who spammed him and was deceitful. That same firm is very free to harm another site for sure now. Why not out them? Firms like like only hurt the industry and should be outed BY NAME.
Second; while that is said, don't you think a site owner who wants free referrals from Google, and they all do, should be responsible for their own actions, at least in part? I do. If a website wants to succeed, then they had better at least know the basics about some rules and guidelines, right? Oh sure, we all can hem and hall all day long about how Google is trying to police the web, etc, but ultimately, it's their damn search engine and index and rules, so they can do as they please. It's up to each and every website who wants to do well in Google to maybe read Google's website from time to time, don't ya think? I do. That's another common sense thing you learned in business101. I did.
Third; if it wasn't for the screwy SEO industry in the first place who wants to find and exploit every single loophole they can, we wouldn't have a situation that is almost impossible to handle. What would happen if Google simply counted every link? Oh, I know; their index would be in a shambles and searchers would go elsewhere to search, .. that's what.
Why does the SEO industry feel it's totally hands-off to any problems that it itself created? Oh yes; Google is at fault as well, as Google is very lenient on spam. VERY. Google is very lenient on many things. VERY. But surely the SEO industry is just as much at fault since the main leader of it will not and does not OUT SPAMMERS.
You can't have it both ways. The industry needs to grow up and start throwing the scum on the street and not letting them back in. Unless or until we do that, we will continue to have a second rate industry which never grows up.
In my humble opinion, I figured this post was more about emphasising to web masters not to lose sleep over what Google is up to, but to build your site for your users, not Google. And besides, if people who paid and sold loads of links were at the top of all the search engines, where would 'ma and pa' be with their lack of buying power.
Personally, I'm loving Links Week - it's answering heaps of questions for me. Keep up the good work!
How do I prove that my links weren't paid for? I keep track of all the dance events in my town and put links on the "more info" pages to whoever is sponsoring the event and they usually are in the business of dancing. How can I keep from getting penalized for putting a lot of elbow grease into listing everyone's dance?
I have a question that may not be salient for this particular post, but I cannot find out how to even begin to find the right person or entities to bother about this. I own and edit a small website:
www.captainsjournal.com
And up until about a month or perhaps six weeks ago, I got about 150 hits per day via Google organic searches. My total visits is still small, perhaps 400 per day then, now limited to less than that.
A change was made in either the search engine, or I have been targeted, or something has changed.
I cannot now even type the URL and get directly to my site. What gives, and what changes have been made?
Any help is much appreciated. You can contact me at the site e-mail address.
Ah I love it knowing that I don't know everything. I completely understand Google's desire to weed out link farms, spam linking... Here's one though - we have about 500 clients. Many of them have expressed a desire to share links between sites for link value. If we nofollow them, then there's not much link value.
this is a closed network of clients - so not just any site can be listed in the link exchange. Since we only work with legitimate business owners, I would think this would be an acceptable practice. Yet it seems that Google could easily (through automated imperfect software) deem such a page full of links to be one that meets your link farm or doorway page criteria...
Since I only want to be able to stay truly in Googles good graces (because doing so can only ultimately relate to best practices) I really need to understand this one.
Doug,
You and I see eye to eye more than you think. I too think the SEO industry is rife with scumbags who will exploit every little loophole they can find.
BTW... I'm not an SEO. I write about the subject from time to time and I do study it to a degree, but I do not actively sell SEO services anymore. I mainly build my own sites and blog about related issues. ;)
At any rate, my main point was, and is that the average SMB may or may not have the budget to hire an industry "expert". Those SMBs *should* know the rules before they play Google's game, I agree with that. However, Google's game has now become that of a dictator who is demanding misuse of a standard because their own software cannot distinguish good content from bad. How is that the responsibility of the SMB, or any business, for that matter? It's not!
I've had clients with excellent copy that was highly targeted, keyword rich (but not spammy) and was as relevant as relevant can be in a highly specialized niche, with NO OUTGOING LINKS. Yet they were ranked lower than splogs that were full of crap because those splogs had more backlinks. What's wrong with this picture?
That is my point. Fix the algorithm. Don't demand that others do your job for you.
I think Google would be quite wise to listen to those who are criticizing what they are doing and, at the very least, recognize the problem that they are creating.
You keep mentioning common sense. My friend, common sense is not so common. It is common among people of intelligence, but not everyone who owns a business or website is intelligent. Quite honestly, there are a LOT of stupid people out there. ;)
Google, I have noticed several popular directories that still provide pagerank passing links for a fee. Yahoo, BOTW and business.com come to mind. What is you policy on this? I know us little guys aren't supposed to do it. What about them?
After reading this, I am thinking that I maybe could do something better. Right now, we post press articles about us in a PDF format instead of linking to them. Because, the pages where they reside change often or disappear or get archived, we just started making them PDF's and linking to those files to save headaches down the road. Should I not be doing this? OR not doing it right away and instead link to the actual article for a while?
With references to bad practices of linking out, what is the justification to keep the links on a given page to less than 100. How does that help? Is 100 just a large random number?
My site is attached to my blog directly as http://affiliate-bookmarks.com/Website and can be reached via small 'w' in website with or without a 'www'.I didn't know about : *link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/page.html"/* and haven't set up 302 pages.Try all the variations.
My site offers information through outlinks,all relevant' but mostly inside javascript or tables ;yet no outlinks are indexed.Do I have to do a review for every outlink for Google to notice me ?
One of my blog pages has a list of links to over 100 blogs of people who either I follow or follow me on another blog.Will that page be penalized ?The outbound links are not indexed by Google although 95% are relevant to my blog's content in some way.
I was intrigued about outbound links for a moment. However, and after reading this on the actual Google Webmaster's Blog, not some other site, I come to realize I was right: link anytime you need to (as long as it is not a "spammy"). Great mini tutorial!
@ " When linking out, am I sending visitors away forever?! "
It's true that you will be sending PR to other pages instead of redistributing it around your own site, but your site's PR is almost entirely affected by external links, normally to your index page, and this will not be reduced by putting these external links up ..
I am just learning about the world of SEO, links and the like. I work for Quality Marquees and Tents and am assisting with inproving our ranking. Very interesting and sooooo much to learn!!!
I'm agree with Doug. It's just a common sense. It help us to develop more structured website in common sense. So, keep up the good work :)
My company won't allow us to use outbound links on our site and there are a lot of sites I'd love to link exchange with. I definitely see the benefits of linking out and do this for my blog...very informative post
Hi everyone,
Since over a year has passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Central Help Forum.
Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team
Post a Comment