Bloggers are an interesting group. One of the reasons why folks call it a blogosphere is that we're often interconnected through our outbound links and our mentions of one another. We had an interesting conversation regarding linking in the office this week - enough to discuss it here. Ultimately, the question was:
Should outbound links be encouraged in your blog post? Looks like a great topic for some blog research. Some of the conversation was interesting. From the naysayers:
I believe this approach is one that will result in me seen as more authoritative on the subject. I've got a ton of blog posts that are #1 in Google's search engine results and some of them point to some destinations that don't have great ranking. They do; however, provide the reader with additional information - making me a trustworthy source.
The balance is up to you, do more search results lead to more conversions? Or does better content lead to more conversions? I think it's a balance of the two. My bottom line: do not link to spammy sites. If you're wondering how to determine that, it's pretty simple - do they show up in a search result? Google doesn't like providing spammy sites in their results.
Should outbound links be encouraged in your blog post? Looks like a great topic for some blog research. Some of the conversation was interesting. From the naysayers:
- Only if you utilize a nofollow in your anchor tag. At one time, the nofollow link was only relatively utilized for comment spam, but some think you should use it everywhere to avoid any risk of hurting your ranking to bad links.
- Never link to an external site. Outbound links drive traffic away from your page where you are trying to engage people. You're driving them away.
- No, because the risk of an outbound link outweighs the benefits of providing external resources to support your blog post.
- Yes, outbound links - especially ones to your corporate site, products or services, can enhance the optimization of the destination site.
- Yes, outbound links provide external resources to support your post.
- Yes, outbound links often result in the destination site taking the time out to read your post or even linking back to you in the future.
I believe this approach is one that will result in me seen as more authoritative on the subject. I've got a ton of blog posts that are #1 in Google's search engine results and some of them point to some destinations that don't have great ranking. They do; however, provide the reader with additional information - making me a trustworthy source.
The balance is up to you, do more search results lead to more conversions? Or does better content lead to more conversions? I think it's a balance of the two. My bottom line: do not link to spammy sites. If you're wondering how to determine that, it's pretty simple - do they show up in a search result? Google doesn't like providing spammy sites in their results.
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