Exposing Outbound Link Myths
Outbound links are something of a mystery in the world of link building. Getting quality inbound links has always been a priority for an SEO, with the general acceptance that links from high PageRank sites will boost your rankings while links from low quality spam sites will severely hamper your efforts.
Partly due to SEO being so concentrated on inbound links and partly due to the idea that a huge number of outbound links looks bad, SEO’s have begun to actively avoid outbound links on their websites. I’m here to tell you that outbound links can actually be a help not a hindrance! Here are some of the myths of external links exposed:
Outbound Links Weaken Your Internal Links
You may be worried that having outbound links on a page detracts from the power of your internal links that you have carefully constructed. That’s very unlikely. Take a look at a typical page on your website and there could be anything from 20-100+ internal links. Having one or two external links is going to have minimal effect on the power of those links.
Reciprocal Links Are Now Worthless
Google may have said that reciprocal links are not as powerful as they used to be as they show signs of link building but they’re still useful. If you link to other relevant sites and resources then chances are they will link back to you. While you may not get much link juice from reciprocal links, a link from a relevant site with higher traffic than yours will send referral traffic your way. Instead of unpersonal links on a resources page, write a blog post and mention another website or person. If you draw that website’s attention to your post then they might write a post in return. Even if they don’t, then they might mention you on their social networks and help increase your traffic and reputation. The best way to build good links is to build relationships with other bloggers, the best way to get their attention is to write a post referencing them!
You Will Lose Traffic to Other Sites
Contrary to this claim, you may even increase traffic. Firstly, minimise the number of people leaving your site by setting all external links to open in a new window. This means that when somebody clicks a link on your site they will come back to it after they’ve viewed the page you’ve linked to. Once you’ve done that, consider that if you provide a link to a really useful website then the user will remember that you showed them where to go. If you have useful links across your website then they may bookmark you and keep coming back for more information. One of the highest traffic pages on our site is one that links to hundreds of Social Media tools. Although people come on the page and leave once they find the tool they’re looking for, they come back regularly for more.
I hope to have changed any ill feeling towards outbound links, just make sure they’re good ones! Just as you only want links from high quality sites you only want links to high quality sites. You are telling users and search engines that your site is useful and is willing to direct people to relevant resources. So stop spending all your time on inbound links and have a think about your outbound link strategy.
( Original post by Silicon Beach Training via site-reference.com )
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