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Outbound Links and Misunderstandings
By Mike Murray | September 6, 2007
The links issue is an evolving topic with a few traps and a lot of hype that scares people.
A client contacted us yesterday because he’s all worried about his outbound links. He shouldn’t be and you shouldn’t be either in most cases.
Outbound links don’t help you in the sense that they could affect the ranking algorithms – at least not directly. Inbound links are another story. Depending on the authority of the website offering a link to you (i.e. how many and what sites link to it), you could receive some benefit.
Outbound links don’t hurt you in that you’re not penalized for linking to other websites. The only exception is when websites link to non-related website directories or link collections just for the sake of linking. In our client’s case, he is linking to relevant places, not a myriad links.
The concern was that he would erode the value of his own PageRank by linking to other places. PageRank that is assigned on a page by page basis. In other words, many pages can provide quality content and help your overall reputation with Google. If anyone is going to lose, it may be the websites you link to. If you have a page with many links, they all share whatever portion of PageRank you have available. It’s split multiple ways. Everyone gets a little juice, not the whole cup.
The client also was confused by the “nofollow” attribute. It was a great addition to our industry to help block people from spamming blogs, for example. If all blog posts have a “no follow” attribute, the place you give a link won’t qualify for any of the PageRank you otherwise might pass along.
But I wouldn’t take the time to bolt down your website and correct all of the website outbound links. Depending on the website, it could be a lot of work.
We told the client that his company likely linked to other websites because they offer value — not to boost anyone’s natural search engine rankings.
It’s not uncommon to link to organizations that can’t return a link back to you because of their own protocols. If a place does link to you and they use the “no follow,” you can still get traffic, just not the PageRank influence. In some cases, maybe you can review some significant links you’re getting and decide if you want the other place to consider removing the “no follow” attribute to help you — if it’s even using one.
Links — like much of the Internet and search engines — are about relevance. If you’re linking out for a good reason, don’t worry about it. You may have some real fires to put out elsewhere, not the artificial ones fueled by hype.
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September 10th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
The rules for Links are always changing. Keep linking to what you think is a quality link and take it one link at a time.
October 17th, 2007 at 6:10 am
[...] Outbound links to other blogs does not directly help you with your search engine rankings, but it helps you getting more visitors. Other bloggers will try to give back the link love you gave them. Maybe in one of their next posts, they will put a link back to one of your posts which will bring in interested visitors to you. It´s just a game of give and take. [...]