Use External Links
-
Hey
I noticed when analysing my pages that Moz gives the following advice about adding external links to my articles;
"On any page specifically targeting a keyword, link externally to at least one (and possibly more than one) relevant, trusted resources as a best practice."
As a small business I work pretty damn hard to get visitors to my website, so why on earth would I want to go to all that trouble just to send them away again to a trusted resouce?
Secondly, what exactly is a "trusted resource"? Can I simply use search and use the top competitor, for example Moz or Wikipedia and does the anchor need to be an exact match or will a partial suffice. I say this because I already have the top spot for my longtail, so an exact match would be pointless.
And lastly, I notice that pretty much all quality sites use external links to open in the same window i.e. not target=_blank, I never thought of it before today, but now that I'm considering using external linking in my articles I guess it's important to know the answer - i.e. Is this a best practice and does this give any seo benefit?
Cheers, Lee :)
-
thanks for the share Linda, the first picture made me laugh out loud lol
Have to say this guys makes a relevant points and as you say definite food for thought.
Cheers, Lee
-
Google's ranking factors are designed to improve the user experience [or so they say ], but a lot of them are definitely subjective ["Would you trust the information presented in this article?" for instance], so yes, it is sometimes hard to know exactly how to make that improvement.
But linking to a random high-rank site will not improve the user experience--the site has to be relevant. If you are writing on a very niche topic, there may not be a very high-rank site that is very relevant. Linking to a good (even if not super high rank) site that is very relevant will create an association for Google between that good site and its relevant content and your page, which is a positive thing. Google is looking at many quality signals at the same time and no single SEO "rule" can really apply equally in all situations.
[You might find this article interesting. The author has gathered a list of "known" Panda factors and where they were found (not the slickest piece you have ever seen but food for thought--a lot of comments as well).]
-
Hi Linda,
thank you very much for taking the time to respond
The Moz advice (which I obtained from the page grading tool) definitely states that there are "seo benefits" from using external links to "trusted sources."
If we follow the logic behind this statement, it implies that these are Google trusted sources and not a personal preference (even given my niche related expertise), otherwise this would mean I could link to any external source, for example another site that I control or a colleagues or business partners site and gain an seo benefit.
Best Lee
-
I wouldn't add an external link for the sake of an external link, but if I were writing about something and I thought that perhaps some of my readers could benefit from some background or additional information, I'd link to it, rather than making my article unnecessarily long and complex. A "trusted source" would be one that you, as an expert, trust. It should be a good-quality site but does not have to have rankings like Wikipedia.
As far as opening links in a new window, this is not considered to be a good thing. The user should be in charge of their browsing experience and should have the option to open a new tab or window only if they choose to. (An exception to this would be if there is some reason you need both pages open--say you are referring to content on another page and going through it step-by-sep, for example.)
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
-
Linking to External Site In Nav Bar
Hi, we are a celebrity site but also own a separate sports site with its own URL. We have a link to that site in our Nav bar. Are we being penalized by having that link? thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Uinterview0 -
Duplicate links from forum what to do?
After a crawl it found over 5k errors and over 5k warnings. Those are: Duplicate page content; Duplicate page title; Overly-Dynamic URLs; Missing Meta descr; Title Element too long. All those come from domain.com/forum/ I don't need SEO on forum so what should I do? What could be an easy solution to this? No index? No follow? Please help
On-Page Optimization | | OVJ0 -
I am optimizing title tags and was wondering if it makes a difference if I use "commas" in between keywords that are synonyms or should I use "and" instead?
For example: "pants, trousers at pants.com" or "pants and trousers at pants.com".
On-Page Optimization | | EcomLkwd0 -
Using display: none in h1 tag
Hello, For the h1 tag on my landing page, I currently have 'Welcome to Edison Ford'. I was thinking of adding the keyword I'm targeting (property maintenance bristol) to the h1 tag which would look like this 'Welcome to Edison Ford Property Maintenance Bristol' Would it be a good idea to wrap the property maintenance bristol part in a span tag and add 'display: none;' to the styling? Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | PeterAllen910 -
Do we have too many links in our footer?
Hi guys, we have 41 links on our holiday(vacation) rental website, this seems too many when looking at best practice. 24 of these are links to community pages while 8 link to activities pages. The community and activity pages are also accessible from links on the top menu so they are not strictly necessary but do get 10% of site clickthroughs according to Google in-page analytics. I therefore do not want to remove the links if there is no good evidence that google will penalize us for this. What do you think would be best for our site? Thanks, John Tulley. footer.jpg
On-Page Optimization | | JohnTulley0 -
Optimise duplicate products or canonical link
We exist in a niche market with a good % of products that sell well at specific times of the year. Lets say for example a red cup can be sold as a christmas red cup and a valentine red cup or just a red cup. Would we be best to optimize each specific product specifically for those seasons/events on different pages or keep google pointed to just one page using a canonical link.
On-Page Optimization | | LadyApollo0 -
Alt tag using photoshop
Simple question i think. Ive started adding alt tags to images using the slice tool in photoshop. This takes up a menu were the last part of is alt tag: This way to add alt tags does work right? I used SEO-browser afterwards and couldnt see the tag. There are maybe other better ways to see if your tags are in there ? Dan L.
On-Page Optimization | | danlae0 -
Too many on-page links
I manualy counted the links on my website http://www.commensus.com which came to around 50, but SEO moz says I have over 100 and google isn't seeing them all.
On-Page Optimization | | jawl44630