Handling External links to articles in a blog
-
I have a blog that has it's own articles but then also want to feature third-party sites that have my op-ed content on them. Wondering what is the best practice for handling external links.
The reason we want to do this:
- Make sure our followers and people who subscribe to our blog see all our content (especially when a third-party "high authority" publisher is featuring articles from our authors
- We also want to be able to get a ranking for the article title when someone searches for it on Search Engines. i.e I write an article for hubspot called "my article about something". When googling "my article about something" I want to see both the Hubspot listing (where my article originated on) as well as a link to my website where I show an abstract (original abstract) and then the link links to the hubspot article.
For example:
(renders a listing of articles with links to each individual article)
If showing an "abstract" for the blog article and then linking out to the third-party source (where content is featured)
www.myblog.com/category/post-title
(renders actual article page)
When showing an individual post-title page what are the minimum requirements (META TAGS, length or amount of characters ,etc)
Thanks in advance!
-
How you implement this will determine whether you get more visibility in search results or harm your own efforts on-site and off-site.
Here are some key points:
Never duplicate the full content across multiple sites if you can avoid that. Duplication of entire entries just forces Google to "figure it all out" and they often do so poorly.
Two solid methods that can both work for your overall needs:
1. Create a "Press" or similar section in your site. Each time a new article shows up in a trusted off-site location, add it to your press section. Either just the Titles and a unique snippet explaining what's contained in the off-site article, or with more info, as long as the info is almost all unique, and not copied from the off-site version.
If you generate a lot of these, be sure to use proper indexable pagination in your site's list of outbound press links.
2. Write full blog articles on your own site that link to those articles, but where you go deep in your own content - make it mostly unique and only do so if you are sure it's a quality piece in its own right.
Either way can work - the 2nd version is more likely to get both the off-site and your own piece indexed most of the time, however if the "press" versions are also robust, they can rank as well.
Here's a screen-capture of how I did that for one of my best articles a couple years ago. The 1st entry is the original article, the 2nd entry is my own site's page about it.
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
-
Relaunching a site that has had thousands of posts linking to the same 20 articles. How to properly setup internal linking?
I'm in the process of relaunching a music news site (www.prefixmag.com) that once did quite well in search (over a million monthly search visits in its prime). The site got crushed by Panda, etc. and we stopped updating it. I'm starting to do more research but one thing that I noticed was we have modules in the right rail (desktop) that are found on all of our article pages that point to the same posts. (Edit: Added attachment. The links in the right rail under Editor Picks, Features, News, Media, etc. are found on every page of the site). In other words, we have thousands of posts that all link to the same 20 or so articles. Should we not do this if we're not trying to emphasize these posts in Google? Assuming this is the case, what is the proper way to do internal linking? Do we simply setup a sitemap and link to it? I'm hoping to have the thousands of articles we've published over the years have a chance to rank in search again. Also, we have a number of posts that are thin in content should those pages not be submitted in the sitemap? Thanks in advance! 2KmX0
Link Building | | leggo0 -
Is it okay to post my blog posts to both an internal blog on our domain and an external blog?
We have a blog internally at kay-grant.com/blog and also created an external blog at ActiveRain.com Is it okay to post the same blog posts to both sites or should I have different content for each blog?
Link Building | | geoff81510 -
External Backlinks - Should I remove/disavow external blog posts done by SEO company?
Last year my company hired an SEO company to build backlinks for targeted achor text keywords. It turns out that they wrote average to below average blog posts that had content related to my business, but that were placed on odd websites, not related to my business. They did this for about one year before I fired them. Should I try to get each of those blog posts removed and then disavow them? If the external links back to my site are nofollow then it is my understanding that I don't really need to worry about them...is that accurate? Is it too risky to keep any external backlinked content alive when it is on a site that is unrelated to my business?
Link Building | | ajgrossman0 -
External links - link to third party sites
Greetings! Actually, got an doubt on linking to external site. The thing, i have working for roof marketers site. They have covered roof products. Each of the products have a page along with major keyword. Actually, i do link from other pages[internally]. Meaning,if i see any main keywords in different page then will link that to corresponding page/product[internally].This is what i am doing to get page rank. Now, my doubt. Some of the pages are having link with main keywords which directs to the third party site those who are really producing the products. But, i remove the third party-link which has with main keywords. Since already the site/my client site having pages for that main keywords. But client really want that link. meaning the links which they have given to direct to third party[product producer] site. So what should i do at this case. Can i just past RAW link like [http://www.thirdpartysite.com] or what do i do. But my client wants that link to be in content area. Hope you would understand my long explanation and case Please help us. Thank you
Link Building | | Webworld_Norway0 -
Blogs
I am thinking of starting a couple off site blogs for myself. 1 I might share some client information and link building and the other would be for me to rant. I was thinking about doing a wordpress or blogger blog, someone recommended Tumblr. Anyone have any suggestions?
Link Building | | ClickIt0 -
Does a hashtag link pass the same amount of link juice as a link without a hashtag?
Example 1: link to: http://www.domain.com/#something-inside-the-page Example 2: link to: http://www.domain.com/
Link Building | | adriandg0 -
Open Site Explorer - Finding 404s from my competitor's external linking Root Domains
I want to find websites that have linked 404s to my competitors. My goal is to contact webmasters who have linked to my competitors with 404s, but I cannot figure out how to get Open Site Explorer to give me that data. I can easily see this in GWT for my own site, but I need this for my competition instead. Does anybody know a quick way to get this information?
Link Building | | Francisco_Meza0 -
Article Submissions for Link Building
Does anyone have any experience submitting articles as a Link Building method, and if so, do you have any specific submission sites that you would recommend?
Link Building | | OrganicDigital0