Nov
18
We have always been very strong advocates of linking to other sites in your blog posts and articles, and last month, Google confirmed on their official blog what we knew all along: it’s good to spread the link love, and it won’t damage your rankings as long as the links are good ones.
Outbound linking boosts your credibility
Google also agrees that good outbound links help to boost your credibility by establishing your blog as a valuable reference for your visitors. When people see that you have done your research and are happy to share your findings with them, they will come back to your site again and again. And if you contribute to the discussion by adding your own comments and your own perspective on the matter, your posts become even more valuable and relevant.
What’s more, linking helps you make contact with webmasters of other sites, who could be linking back to you in the future.
But won’t I lose visitors by linking?
Of course, the number one concern about outbound linking is that you would be losing visitors to the sites you link to, but read what Google had to say on that:
Visitors may initially leave your site to check out relevant information. But can you recall your behavior on sites that link to good articles outside their domain? Personally, I always come back to sites I feel provide commentary and additional resources. Sometimes I stay on the original site and just open up the interesting link in a different tab. It’s likely that with relevant outbound links you’ll gain repeat visitors, and you won’t lose them forever.
How to avoid the bad kind of links
To be sure, there is a kind of links that Google does not like and that will negatively affect your site. You guessed it: link spam. This includes both paid-for outbound links, and the self-promoting links that some of your blog readers will include (or more likely blatantly promote) in their comments.
There are different things you can do to avoid being penalised by such links. One is to have a solid anti-spam plugin that filters your comments, such as Askimet for WordPress. These plugins generally work by comparing your comments to a huge database of comment spam, and have a great success rate at weeding out the baddies. Still, they are not 100% foolproof. This means that you should also monitor and review your comments (ideally before they are published) to make sure that no spam gets through. Keeping spam out of your blog, of course also has the added benefit of making sure that all your readers see is juicy, relevant content.
Another thing you should consider doing in order to avoid link spam penalties is to set up your blog to include the nofollow attribute (rel=”nofollow”) in each and every user-generated link. When you do this, Google will completely ignore these links as though they never existed, meaning you don’t have to worry about them. Google also wants you to disclose paid-for outbound links with the nofollow attribute, even though this has created a great controversy among SEO specialists.
So, to summarise, link and link away as long as you do it responsibly and because the site you are linking to is interesting to your readers. A little common sense will go a long way when spreading the link love and sooner or later some of the karma will come back to you in the form of inbound links too.
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View John Beckley's profile
Thanks for the post. I agree with you in the prospect of outbound linking as long as it does not effect the page ranking.