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
-
Product Page Links
I have a product category page at https://www.hurtlegear.com.au/s1000rr/ which currently has 38 products on it. Problem is, all the product titles start with the name of the text: "bmw s1000rr" (because that's what they are) - so that means there are 38 anchored internal links on that page, all starting with the same keyword. You can see how that might look to the Google crawler. Recently that page dropped from around 15 to outside the top 100, and Moz tells me that the page is keyword stuffed with "bmw s1000rr" (no suprise) so I'm guessing that may be the reason the page has disappeared out of the SERPs. I don't really want to change all the product titles (then they wouldn't make sense) so I'm just wondering if there is any way around this? Is there some way of telling Google that this is a product category page and therefore to ignore the anchor text in all of those product links? Can/should the links have some kind of markup on them? Or is the page beyond help? Basically I'm looking at a way of keeping the product titles as they are, but avoiding a page penalty from Google somehow. I'm a bit of a newbie, any suggestions would be most appreciated. Cheers, Graeme
On-Page Optimization | | graeme720 -
On hover my links are with additional Parameters while links that are indexed are without additional parameters
On hover my links are with additional Parameters while links that are indexed are without additional parameters does it impact in a negative way. For ex: i have a site http://www.yoursite.com and Its internal pages that are linked to the site are in pattern of http://www.yoursite.com/jobs-in-india?xz=3_0_5 and these are the pages which are interlinked through out the site. When any user click the link they will land to the similar pages with additional parameter even on mouse hover any one can see the same link. while we have used Canonical, so pages that are getting indexed are http://www.yoursite.com/jobs-in-india. But my concern is: - To showing two different link as when Google crawler follow the site they will get the links with additional parameter while in its index its a URL without additional parameter so is there problem that we can encounter or is there any negative impact on ranking?
On-Page Optimization | | vivekrathore0 -
Are there to many internal links here?
This is our main Motorcycle Parts page. In my opinion there are to many links on this page. They have put links to all the top brands after products. Do you think having all these links could be hurting our rankings/ ability for google to crawl the site efficiently? The links are good for navigation, I just think there are way to many there like over 200. Here is the page you can see what i am talking about http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/s/49/61/Motorcycle-Parts
On-Page Optimization | | DoRM0 -
Do I really have too many links on my startpage?
My site www.poker-coaching.net is built with Joomla, and I have one main menu that links all articles (app. 120) in one language from the start page. The site has a language selection menu with translations available in 4 other languages, and for each language, there are another 80 articles linked from the main page. The SEOMOZ crawling report now say that I have too many links from the main page. I always thought it was a good thing for SEO to have articles linked from the main page - do I need to restructure my site and start building multi-level menu structures, where I would have a main menu on the start page and the next level menu would only be shown after a user clicks on a main menu item?
On-Page Optimization | | CatfishTPA0 -
How to best use our blog posts for SEO?
My company recently created a WordPress hosted blog. It is hosted completely separate from our company site. The primary domain for the blog is blog.mydomainname.com, but we immediately created a folder within our company website for www.mydomainname.com/blog that has a reverse proxy to the blog itself. I'm curious though if we should consider taking the content from the blog posts and re-creating that within our company website as well? The blog posts are very good SEO rich content, and we always struggle to find new content to put on our company website as it is already. Would like to get some folks thoughts on this. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | KHCreative0 -
Using magentos own url re-writes
We are changing ecommerce platforms. Is it best to use magentos own url re-writes to redirect every page of a site from its old url to it new one?
On-Page Optimization | | LadyApollo0 -
Best article about internal linking structure?
Hi! Could you please recommend me a good and deep article about best practises in internal linking structure? I need to rethink the structure of a big site (lucky me it's very hierarchical) and I would like to have a look at some great articles about this to consolidate some ideas and have some new ones. I've read some but I would like some recommendations 🙂 Some articles about information architecture would be appreciated as well! Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | jorgediaz0 -
100 links on one page
we're recommended 100 links or less on one page. is the 100 links including header and footer links?
On-Page Optimization | | jallenyang0