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
-
A lot of blogs use wordpress or blogspot, are these blogs still useful for SEO in terms of linkbuilding, or should they be avoided?
I am very new to linkbuilding and SEO as a whole, so please forgive my ignorance. Reaching out to bloggers is a common tactic, but I've found a lot of people tend to blog with the assistance of wordpress or blogspot. I was wondering whether these blogs are still useful for SEO or if it is best to avoid them? Thanks in advance, Lewis
Link Building | | Samstore0 -
No follow external links
Hi all, Our blog utilizes a fair amount of guest blog articles. Each article includes a link to the authors site. Some memebers of our team believe it is best practice to no follow all of these links while others believe we should follow the links, Our page rank and domain authority are almost always much higher then the guest blogger's site so we want to know the pros and cons of nofollow vs follow of these links. Since the domain authority and page rank of guest blog sites are low will this have a negative effect on our site? They aren't spammy and are legitimate sites covering similar content. Any feedback would be greaty appreciated!
Link Building | | STP_SEO0 -
Grr SEO linking.. I am not understanding why I wouldn't have lots more links.. Please help. Thanks
I have done the whole moz open exploer and I am not understanding why my site wouldn’t have more links registering to my website.. I have lots of sites(directorys and 3rd party) with my website domain in them. The only one that is linking to my site is BBB.com and my advertsing with saint paul press. www.somerersetautodealer.com But if I have links with all kinds of automotive directories why wouldn’t they register? I am sure this a simply answer or that I am not understanding something. Thanks for your help! Scott
Link Building | | Scott12340 -
Manual Links Vs. Smart Links
Hey Everybody, Is there any downside to the smart link plugins that I see all over wordpress? Basically in short I enter a keyword and where I want that link to go (primarily internal) and set the parameters of repetition etc and it automatically adds the link to that. Now other than the obvious situation where it might put a link in an awkward place, is there anything wrong with this sort of software? Part of me things that this sort of software would not be liked by Google, and that it isn't really getting counted as a true link, but i wanted to see if there were other thoughts or experience with this.
Link Building | | HashtagHustler0 -
Poor Blog and Website DA and links
Hi There We have a mature website and a mature blog with over 500 genuine blogs written on it over 4 years. In terms of actual "people" value it has to be high. We used to get 1000 visitors per day, we now get 300. We still have 850 subscribers so its of a certain size. However we have been hit by the Penguin/Panda updates and our DA has dropped to what everyone is telling us is too low for a site like this and we still have a google backlink problem, unyet we only have 190 external links that we think are all OK now. The problem we have is that we seem to have too many links from the blog to the main website with the same anchor text. This has occurred with a blogroll style link to the home page which appears on every post/page of the blog, also I think we have too many anchor same anchor text links to product pages (Motorola ES400) and category pages (Tablet PC). We're going through changing these now so that we have the right mix but the specific questions I wanted to ask were: 1. Will loads of links with the same anchor text affect us if the blog is counted as internal links. Its on the same "blog" sub-domain as the main website. 2. Will this affect the DA of both sites? 3. Is Wordpress capable of damaging us with all the extra pages it creates automatically. We've done nothing but genuine content posting here and i'm sure we can get it back but it kind of really demotivates you when 2/3rds of your traffic goes overnight. Many thanks for any help.
Link Building | | Raptor-crew0 -
Many Blogs or One Blog?
Hi There, Presently I have many blogs across a range of domains, each one targeting the client/type of user interested in that product (or service in this case). I originally set up this strategy to use the content of each blog to create a "link juice farm" (our products are educational courses so have a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT target market depending on the course area), which in turn links to the related page/course on our main site. My question is, is this a viable strategy, or should I be focusing on building content only on my main site blog with subcategories for each product? Link juice farming on product/client specific blogs, or focus on content for each course niche on main site, that is the question?! Thanks in advance for you insights here people. I really appreciate you taking the time.
Link Building | | love-seo-goodness0 -
How do I build links for an Auto Detailing Company?
How do I go about building links for my website www.capitolshine.com Are there places I don't want to have my links? How do I know? How do I reciprocate? Where would I put a link on my website without looking like I'm just selling out to anybody who asks? And how do I actually put the links on my site? Do I need a separate page?
Link Building | | CapitolShine0 -
Techniques for Finding Blogs that Accept Guest Blog Posts
I'm running into an issue where we are having difficulty finding blogs that accept guest blog posts after doing this on 300 or so blogs. We usually Google "guest post" related keywords with "blog" or take blogs off of lists of sites that accept guest blog posts. What techniques do you recommend? Do any of you use myblogguest.com with any success?
Link Building | | qlkasdjfw1