Outbound Linking
Last month, Google published an official statement about linking out to other websites.
Linking out to relevant websites can help provide readers in-depth information about similar topics and additional resources. This gives your viewers confidence in your expertise on the subject. Good links to other websites can make visitors want to come back for more analysis on future topics. Another positive effect of outbound linking is that it helps build relationships with other domain experts which turm builds a mutually beneficial networking system.
According to Google, unmonitored links and undisclosed paid advertising outbound links can reduce your website’s credibility. To ensure your site doesn’t lose credibility, make sure that user-generated comments are moderated and/or add the rel=”nofollow attribute to user generated links.
Google doesn’t like paid links. If you are receiving payment for outbound links, add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to the link. Google recommends not having too many links per web page as this may confuse viewers and is not considered user-friendly. Google makes it very clear that you shouldn’t worry about the PageRank of a website as long the site is relevant to your website.
Another important piece of information is that a website will not automatically get a ranking boost on Google if it has links from .edu or .gov domains.
Links from .edu and .gov domains have no special value.
[If you get an .edu link and no one is linking to that .edu page, you're not going to get any PageRank at all because that .edu page doesn't have any PageRank. [...] We generally treat all links the same – be it from .gov or .edu or .info sites.”]
By using the above guidelines, webmasters can ensure that their outbound linking strategies are bringing in stronger credibility and higher rankings for their sites.
Tags: internet marketing, Links, SEO
