Linking out to relevant resources
-
Are there any do's & dont's for linking out to other helpful sites, has Moz got any best practice guides etc?
-
Feel absolutely free to link out as often as you like to as many sources, as long as those sources are high-quality. I personally do not recommend nofollowing links "just in case" they are spammy in the future; the vast majority of the links you create will be to sites that will never suffer a spam problem (and if you are ever worried, perform a check on your site's outbound links once or twice a year).
As Anirban says, a site that links out to trustworthy sites makes itself look more trustworthy in return. A very simplistic way of looking at this is that spam websites link to spam websites and to trustworthy websites. Trustworthy websites _only _link out to other trustworthy websites. So while you're not giving the sort of positive signal that likely results in improved rankings, you are failing to give a negative signal.
If the links are user-generated, place a nofollow tag on them, but if they are editorial and added by you because you appreciate the resource, you can do this as often as you like (within reason, still don't create massive pages with thousands of outbound links!).
-
As long as it's a decent, none malware hosting, none spammy site it won't have an adverse effect. If you trust the site and think it's passing a benefit to users then why not link those sites? it is a good sign of a trustworthy site if it links to good high quality sites as news sites, wikipedia, forbes, about.com, government sites, etc. I believe that it makes my pages richer information sources. I believe that it builds credibility.
Though I will prefer a no-follow tag on those links as a precaution if that sites becomes a spammy site in future. It will not effect your vistors not passes the link juice to the sites you are linking.
I believe that google gives credit for linking out and even if they don't your visitors will.
Hope this helps !
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
-
links
Hi, in our Google Search Console account, all of our links, built up over a long time have disappeared. they just vanished. it was for a Cardiff demolition company, we work for. any idea why links would just vanish?
Link Building | | sarahwalsh0 -
Value of Links? What is each link worth?
Morning Everyone, I just had this thought and wondered what everyone's opinions were in terms of link value in monetary terms. We'll assume for the purposes of this that the links come from contextually relevant sites and that the sites in question have got the Moz DA from being high quality and have a good quality incoming link profile. Its a bit of a theoretical question, but i guess imagine if the only way you could get links was to pay for them, what would they be worth to you. This is link value for SEO purposes, they will have in addition value from traffic from good sites, that no doubt varies wildly depending on topic. I assume everyone also agrees on: The first link from a domain is the most valuable High DA sites are worth more than low ones. So could anyone who has an opinion on the link value suggest a monetary value for links. Its really just using a monetary amount to see how best to target my time. Here is my example of what might be expected, but I am hoping people with more knowledge will perhaps correct it. DA Rating First Link 2nd-5th Link 5th-10th Link 10Plus Links 5 $5 $2 $1 $0 15 $7 $3 $2 $1 25 $25 $10 $5 $2 35 $45 $20 $7 $3 45 $65 $30 $11 $4 55 $95 $45 $19 $5 65 $200 $100 $45 $6 75 $350 $120 $65 $9 85 $700 $240 $95 $15 95 $1100 $450 $200 $30
Link Building | | wellandpower1 -
Link from a directory
Hi, im submitting a clients website to some directories. They are a dental practice and I'm adding them to this website http://goo.gl/Tvyabd Once i added the business to its directory it asked me to add a link (in so many words) back to its website from my clients website. Is this ok to do or is it seen as spam? Im confused about this as sometimes directories are free and sometimes they ask for a fee for it to be fast tracked to put it on the website. I always check the Domain authority of the websites and make sure they are relevant to the industry that I'm working in but again not sure if this would be seen as "paying" for links. Thanks Ade
Link Building | | popcreativeltd0 -
Should I Disavow a Link Like This?
I just saw this link appear for my website (www.webhostinghero.com) in ahrefs.com this morning: http://freedatingsiteregistry.com/tag/website-template/ (search for text anchor "hosting reseller") Obviously it's a scraper site. Other than that, my link profile is clean. Should I disavow this?
Link Building | | sbrault740 -
Wierd link
We have recently receive linek from one website. The site is quite very powerful for the word we try to rank, however the link is kind of wired. This is how it looks like: http://villasdiani.com/?db The webmaster of the site said that he ads (?db) on the end so as we would see on our analytics the traffic from his site.. Also the link is from footer...is this good or it does not have value
Link Building | | VillasDiani0 -
Total Links vs Google Webmaster Site Links
I am interested why the numbers between SEOmoz and Google are so different. In SEOmoz we only show 17,000ish links from 190ish domains. In Google, we show 200,000+ links from 370 domains. Why is there such a dramatic difference?
Link Building | | webspecdesign0 -
Removed Link
After I have removed a link, how long does it take for it to be reflected in Google WMT?
Link Building | | raph39880 -
Link Placement and Trust
Hey all I am looking at a new SEO campaign and am just starting to have a look at the competition and their links. This is a client in the website design industry who operates in a given city in the UK. Taking a quick look, the competition seems well established and there is plenty of companies ranking on the first page for all of the key terms. When I start to dig a little deeper though it gets a little more interesting and this maybe relatively unique to this industry but I think it also applies to spam links and any company that supplies white label website based services. Basically, the competition have lots of links. I have reviewed the top 10 competing sites across various terms and there is no shortage of links and lots of anchor text variations. Here is the stats from open site explorer for the one site that commonly comes up again and again. Page Level 61 - Page Authority 6.78 - mozRank 6.13 - mozTrust 30,144 - Total Links 30,064 - External Followed Links 33 - Internal Followed Links 325 - Linking Root Domains Domain Level 53 - Domain Authority 5.13 - Domain mozRank 5.10 - Domain mozTrust 47,969 - Total Links 44,788 - External Followed Links So, this gives us lots of nice metrics and the new deep analysis tool in keyword research easily allows us to get some more data on what exactly is driving the ranking of this site and the others who all rank in a similar way. Link Quality This is where it gets a bit more interesting and this applies to all the sites in the first ten results for the various keywords we are interested in (general keywords for the homepage at this stage). The links are primarily domain wide and in the footer. They are things like: website designed by x
Link Building | | Marcus_Miller
web design by x
website design
website design in <area name="">
<area name=""> website design
(you get the picture) Quality vs Quantity So, whilst the competitors have lots of links, from a reasonable number of sites, they are pretty much all site wide footer links. This is fairly clear when we look at total links 30,000 from only 300 sites. My thinking here is that the quality of these links is not that great: poorly positioned on the page domain wide narrow anchor text and in some cases no 'click to visit' type links Content These sites are pretty much all dull as hell. Service pages, clients, jobs done, maybe a case study but really, nothing I would really class as interesting (hence only links from their clients sites hey). So, my question is Has anyone built a campaign with quality vs quantity? Do you have any tips, experience or feedback? Our strategy will be built around great content, promotion of that content and much more (not explored that) but at the foundation it will be a content and promotion strategy. Really, if I break it down, I am looking at the above as 300 links, from the footers of various sites. If we were to get 300 links from quality sources and then bulk it out with some similar footer style links from the clients clients (they are not 100% keen on this so we may not go that route yet) then... these established big boys really should not be too difficult to topple in my mind given enough time, content and effort. What are your thoughts people? Anyone conducted a quality vs quantity campaign like this? Any feedback? Cheers
Marcus P.S. SEOMoz - is there any chance that a link trust or quality metric could be built into the tools at some point in the future as sheer volume, is not always the best indicator and as times goes on I would imagine that to be even more true.0