When criteria do you use for external linking?
-
When linking out to external sources what criteria do you use? Also, do you ever add the URL in plain text instead to conserve link juice?
-
I link out to other sources frequently too - I work on this principle - will linking to another site enrich this information for the person reading it. Linking to others sites when appropriate is only natural for building a great online resource, which I think is what we all want, that is why we spend time creating great content and marketing our sites online, working on optimization strategies etc. Whether you are selling products, services or blogging creating a site that is a rich resource with great content should always be your aim as this will lead to increases in all aspects, so don't be afraid to add links to other sites if you think it would help the visitor to your site - a website with a link profile that does this looks the most natural..
-
I link out a lot. Every page that I link to is better than my own site in some way. I don't worry about linking out and have zero hesitation to linking to six, eight, ten great sources of info on a single page.
-
External linking is fine and often times good. If you think about it, how natural is just solely having you link to your own content? Not so natural. Link to good sources and good sources will link to you.
Now the key is to not go crazy and link to multiple sites in a single page without giving yourself any love.
If they are blog posts, I think it is good to link out. Now if it was a product page on an online store, not so much.
-
I am pretty picky about linking out to other websites and rarely have an external link more than once per page unless it makes complete sense to have the multiple external links on that one page. That said, it does depend on the site and the page. If it is a blog, I'm more generous with external links. Still though, with any external links I make sure it is a site I'm willing to link to (good authority, good fit for users, etc.).
Given that I'm only linking out to trustworthy sites, I usually don't add in a rel nofollow. On the few occasions I've had to link to a site that is questionable, I'll always nofollow that link.
On your question of the <a>tag...when I do link out, I do always put it in a regular link just so that I don't make the website harder to use. I've tried the plain text route before and didn't see any huge SEO impacts but did see a huge negative usability impact.</a>
<a></a>
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How is this site ranking so well? Their link profile is awful and website is messy and difficult to use?
Hi folks, This question has been baffling me for some time now and I'm still struggling to get to the bottom of it. www.sterlingbuild.co.uk is the website of choice for Google when it comes to searches relating to roof windows, velux windows, fakro windows etc. I can't understand why? Their link profile is atrocious. I'm struggling to find one 'high quality' link in their profile at all. Most of their links are guest blog posts which Google is apparently now treating as spam, or links from other sites that they own - also spam. The design of the site is incredibly messy and confusing. But one of the biggest flaws of the site (which I am suspicious may also be what is helping them) is they list every single different size of window as a different product. So whereas with most websites in this market, you search for the type of window you want e.g. a VELUX GGL 3050 window, and then choose the size you need from a drop-down menu, Sterlingbuild list every size as a different product. So you have to scroll through reams of product listings to find the window type in the right size before you get to any information about the product itself. Not to mention, their site is riddled with duplicate content because 12 different sizes of product are not different products, they are the same product, just a different size, so they have the identical product description for numerous separate pages basically selling the same product. How on earth has Google decided this is the best website in the marketplace when it comes to roof windows?
Technical SEO | | LukeyB301 -
How to Break Up a Page with Too Many Links
My client has a live page with 100+ links subdivided into 10 categories that each have great potential keyword targeting opportunities. I'd like to improve this page and my intuition is to split it into 11 pages, one page with links to all the others and a bit of content about each. Here's an example of the potential IA: Dog Rescue Groups
Technical SEO | | elenarox
Golden Retriever Rescue - description
Poodle Rescue - description
Cocker Spaniel Rescue - description
Poodle Rescue - description
Labrador Retriever Rescue - description
etc. --------- Golden Retriever Rescue
Link 1 - description
Link 2 - description
Link 3 - description Is this a good idea and will I see a big traffic drop overall at first? Also, these are all internal links, not external.0 -
Are sitewide links bad for SEO?
I have 11 real estate sites and have had links from one to another for about 7 years but someone just suggested me to take them all out because I might get penalized or affected by penguin. My main site was affected on July of 2012 and organic visits have dropped 43%...I've been working on many aspects of my SEO but it's been difficult to come back. Any suggestions are very welcome, thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | mbulox0 -
What are the SEO implications of URLs that use a # in them?
I have several clients who have begun to ask questions about sites that are designed to look like a single page. When you click on a link, the URL changes but it uses a # before (i.e. http://www.kelloggs.com/teamusa**/#**/teamusa/athletes/kerri-walsh.html. What are the SEO implications of having a page set up this way? I noticed that Google has indexed this page but the indexed URL does not include a #. Is Google indexing a separate version of this page? Any insights would be really helpful! Thanks
Technical SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
Link building question
ok so we paid the top firm in seo to help us build an seo strategy and i think we have a good one. We are changing our link building tactics and making more Pr related links and creating awesome content on blogs or our own site to generate traffic and links to our site. We have data from our engineer which should be interesting and we are going to sponsor events, do some link baiting with some of our articles, get a pr firm to get us some good articles on major sites and go to events around phily where we will have unique content and a unique perspective such as car shows ect. The problem is even though all the content will be linked to our site how do we link them. We got hit by penguin but in these articles or blogs should we use the anchor text for the word we are using. The company says dont do it right now bc we got hit with penguin and should only use the brand. I have no idea how only using the brand and not the keywords will magically make us rank for certain keywords. Anyone have an opinion. Thank you and we do pretty well with seo but we did get little bit of a hit with penguin that we are eliminating links and making a new way of thinking when it comes to link building. We also just hired a designer so we are going to build 100s of pages on the site to increase seo with unique content and that is also a goal of ours for the year. We have two marketers on staff and 4 programmers so we are able to do anything. Our urls are terrible but the rest of the site is pretty good
Technical SEO | | goldjake17880 -
Affiliate links
I have a wordpress blog and was wondering the best seo practice for doing affiliate link redirects? Peter
Technical SEO | | PeterM220 -
Link Volume - calculate what you need?
Hi everyone, an interesting question here. How do you determien what link volume you should try and get into your website? What analysis do you do to determine the number of links you feel is right to go into a back-link profiel every month? obviously there is no magic number but its an interesting question to know what others do. Obviously you don't want to build too many or too little. If you have been penalised for bad links in the past and are now back on track - how do you calculate the volume? Do you take links dropping out into consideration?
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
External Links from own domain
Hi all, I have a very weird question about external links to our site from our own domain. According to GWMT we have 603,404,378 links from our own domain to our domain (see screen 1) We noticed when we drilled down that this is from disabled sub-domains like m.jump.co.za. In the past we used to redirect all traffic from sub-domains to our primary www domain. But it seems that for some time in the past that google had access to crawl some of our sub-domains, but in december 2010 we fixed this so that all sub-domain traffic redirects (301) to our primary domain. Example http://m.jump.co.za/search/ipod/ redirected to http://www.jump.co.za/search/ipod/ The weird part is that the number of external links kept on growing and is now sitting on a massive number. On 8 April 2011 we took a different approach and we created a landing page for m.jump.co.za and all other requests generated 404 errors. We added all the directories to the robots.txt and we also manually removed all the directories from GWMT. Now 3 weeks later, and the number of external links just keeps on growing: Here is some stats: 11-Apr-11 - 543 747 534 12-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 13-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 14-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 15-Apr-11 - 521 528 014 16-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 17-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 18-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 19-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 20-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 21-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 26-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 27-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 28-Apr-11 - 603 404 378 I am now thinking of cleaning the robots.txt and re-including all the excluded directories from GWMT and to see if google will be able to get rid of all these links. What do you think is the best solution to get rid of all these invalid pages. moz1.PNG moz2.PNG moz3.PNG
Technical SEO | | JacoRoux0