External linking on a company blog
-
This has been bothering me for a long time.
Our company has a sub-domain blog that gets a respectable amount of traffic but not a lot of SER. Most of our traffic comes from social shares (although we do rank really high for a few key searches).
The blog manager is convinced that providing external links to additional resources or source material "dilutes the SEO juice" for the blog. URLs are provided, but they aren't linked.
Attempts to sway her to the idea that external links are actually Good Things
have been stonewalled.
Tell me I'm right and why.
-
That's the root site - yeah - we've been disavowing a LOT of links lately.
-
I know it's quite off topic but just had a look at your site on Open Site Explorer. You have a load of anchor text to your site for the words "Viagra" and "<a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text" data-text="penis" data-id="9619270841">penis". You might want to look into that! (The bad links that is)</a>
Assuming your site is www.amsvans.com?
-
Matt Cutts has an answer for that question.
-
It would be interesting to know whether making the external link a No Follow makes a difference or not.
In the users eyes it makes no difference if it is No Follow, whereas in Googles eyes they treat the the link in a different way, but do they treat the gesture in the same way!?
-
It sounds like your blog manager assumes the search engine algorithms have no intelligence behind them...like it's all a matter of gaming or following a prescription. Whether you're trying to preserve link equity or not, you have to consider what the end user experience is... just as Google and other search engines say they're trying to do.
As the bot crawls your page, it recognizes a URL (whether it's a link or not). Then, it asks itself, "Is it easier for the reader to copypasta a URL or to simply click on link?" The answer is always click, which is one check against you in the multitude of things search engine bots look at on your site.
Changing this one thing probably won't affect your rankings much, but it's lots and lots of little things like this that sometimes make the difference.
TL;DR. Tell your blog manager to stop making the reader experience worse.
-
Firstly I have no proof of whether or not it is good for rankings so you may want to stop reading now.
Having said that... My personal view has always been that if the link is going off to somewhere that adds extra value to what you are blogging about then it is worth linking to.
I wouldn't just put a link to the homepage of a industry relevant website for no reason.
Wouldn't the internet be an awful place if posts didn't link off to other insightful or funny points of views or videos.
If I was Google I would want to promote sharing of useful information so I think there would be a little algorithmic boost for sharing other sites.
Google says design your website for users, so I think it makes perfect sense. Why would you be punished for supplying good information?
....And for some further insightful reading see this link I just discovered!: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/5-reasons-you-should-link-out-to-others-from-your-website
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
-
Consequences of shutting down a company blog
We’re an ecommerce company with a blog of 150+ posts. The blog brings in very low traffic and we were never that consistent in publishing great and frequent content. We now know our organic traffic comes from other pages that are doing great. So our question.. Should we: 1. Stop linking to the blog internally and just leave the it up as is. No harm here we guess, but these posts are not as relevant now and we feel their high bounce rate and low ranking is affecting our overall performance.
Link Building | | boxador
2. Take it down and 410 the pages. Will that many 410s eventually hurt us?
3. Take it down and 301 to home page of the company. Will permanently redirecting that many pages to our home page hurt us? Appreciate any input.0 -
Inbound link is follow link but we put no follow link back - is it beneficial for rankings?
Dear Moz Community, We are operating in a niche market, where there are not so many content marketing options. What we are left with are link exchanging with relevant sites that are on the same topic but to not directly compete with us. Now we know that if we link back to site A and site a links back to us - for google this is not a very good link. But, some of the sites we are exchanging links with, do not know the term follow vs no follow links. My question - if your link is to site A is a no follow link but they give us a follow link - does it mean thats a better option than a follow vs follow. Thanks for help!
Link Building | | advertisingcloud0 -
How much time does it take for the links to be forwarded to redirected link?
Hi there,
Link Building | | MoeezLodhi
Thank you for taking out some time for this question; I have changed the permalinks last week for a website.. I forgot to redirect old permalinks to the new one.. So I did 301 redirection, it has been 4-5 days since I did that but the links are not forwarded to the new Permalink so far.
How much time should I wait for the links to be forwarded to the new permalinks? Secondly, I am sure I have done the 301 redirect correctly, as when I go to the old url / permalink it directs me to the new permalink. So I am sure 301 is done correctly. Do I need to submit the sitemap again?0 -
Reciprocal links
I've heard that reciprocal links don't count anymore. If i stop linking to a person that links to me, will that link to my website start counting? Do reciprocal links count at all in google? Anchor text? anything? Thanks in advance! Ron
Link Building | | Ron100 -
Page links vs. domain links
Hello all, I am trying to find out how Google weighs page inbound links vs. domain inbound links. I have a domain with about 100,000 inbound links and am adding a new page to my domain which at this time has 0 links. I will be trying to outrank a competitors page that has 6,000 inbound links to the competitors page, but only has 26,000 inbound links to my competitors domain . Is there a formula or a way to know how Google values a page link vs. a domain link?
Link Building | | digitalops0 -
Using an SEO Agency to build one-way links for you via link exchange
There are a number of SEO agencies which offer link building as part of their SEO offerings. I believe they build one-way links to the client site, by offering another link in exchange to the liking site. So, if the client site is "C", and link is being requested from site "A", the site "A" owner is offered a link from site "B" in return. Is this a good and/or recommended practice?
Link Building | | thinkvidya0 -
Blog Roll Links - A good or bad thing ?
I Use Blog roll links all the time but recently they seem to be having a lower effect on listings. Is there a limit on Blog roll links you place on a blog. Internal blog roll links and external blog roll links. Also do you rename your blog roll to something such as popular links like we do ?
Link Building | | onlinemediadirect1 -
Changing Category Names in Wordpress Blog & Inbound Links
I'm working on a wordpress blog, /www.athleticfoodie.com, and I'd like to change the names of the categories so that I include keywords. If I change the current category name of "Healthy Recipes" to "Recipes for Athletes" will I lose the inbound links associated with the category and/or posts? Is there a way to prevent this?
Link Building | | EricVallee340