Do external links hurt ?

[MarkQJones]

Hi there...

My company develops policy management software for SharePoint (called DocRead). Obviously, our main SEO push is purely for the product as that's what pays the bills.

However, we also issue a weekly SharePoint Community newsletter in HTML as we run a large community group for SharePoint. Each newsletter has lots of outbound links (all coming from the same domain as our product is hosted on). These links won't really have anything to do with 'Policy Management' as they are purely to do with SharePoint.

I was wondering if these will harm our ranking in anyway?

FYI  : The newsletters are here : http://www.collaboris.com/sharepoint-newsletters/all-newsletters and the product is here : http://www.collaboris.com/products/policy-and-procedure-management-software

Thanks in advance

Mark

[bradkrussell]

Hi Mark,

If the newsletters aren't adding to your site in any beneficial way (long term, after they have been sent), you could always choose to have them not indexed in Google.

However, having had a quick look at your newsletters and Share Point Community as a whole, these links won't affect your site. They are based around online marketing, tools etc. I wouldn't worry too much about it. You're only linking to trusted resources not dodgy sites.

Cheers

[MarkQJones]

Thanks for the reply and the advice on the anchor text, I am trying to get to grips with all this SEO!

I probably should have bean a bit more concise. I was actually meaning the links OUT from all of our newsletters. For example in this edition we have links to many other SharePoint related sites.

[BizDetox]

Mark i am a firm believer in links that make sense, obviously the link is not coming from a NBA.com where it would be a non-related issued, but i feel as though you develop that software and that it is what you do and the links you are getting are actually based on a product you developed so i don't see the harm in that, Unless you are trying to manipulate the anchor text into providing miss-matched information.

But from the looks of it that does not seem to be the case. I would monitor the situation and after your next crawl see what difference it has been making.

How long have you been getting multiple links for and what anchor text are you using? I also would not want you guys to get flooded with links from them . After a certain point you should no follow that post.

Also take a look at some of your internal linking structure, you have a lot of blog post with images and NO ANCHOR TEXT for the image. You should definitely change that .

Bes Wishes

Hampig M

BizDetox