How logical & beneficial to link out to good and relevant sites/blogs? | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

It's another avenue to get noticed. 

My first step is to link to posts within my own site, thereby recirculating the linkjuice and cresting a network within the site.  If I do send outbound links, I always research them to choose quality pages that have strong PR, MR and traffic ratings, or those that I know for a fact are extremely popular.  The good thing is that there are many such pages written by Yakezie members, so that add an additional benefit.

It's like if you were writing a college paper – you wouldn't refer back to only your own thoughts would you?  Your professor wants to see that you are getting information from reliable sources and using them to back up your thinking.

Jackie said:

I think linking out to relevant sites is an excellent idea, and very natural. (And search engines love natural…)

True Jakie.. Search engines like natural link. But we must keep in mind the that outbound links are relevant, land at legitimate site pages and are helpful to the visitors. Else, everything will bounce back. Moreover, we must avoid linking to keywords; instead we better link out to long tail or no-keywords anchor text to make things more natural. 

LaTisha @YoungAdultFinances said:

I think you forget about the search engines when you are linking out to relevant resources. Link the keywords, link the actual link, what ever.

In this instance it is the human that you are trying to benefit so do what is most natural.

True.. whatever we link out, it must be natural and we should do it for the benefit of the readers. Search engines are smart enough to catch this.. if we spam links there, we will be heavily penalized. However, we should not fill up every thing with links.. Balance is the key.

As someone who runs a monthly roundup I have some thoughts on this …

First, I have found that by linking to other sites they come check our site out.  If they find something they like, they may link back, or comment, or subscribe via rss/email/FB/twitter.  They may not as well.  But the way I see it, if I really like an article and want to share to it with our readers I am going to do just that.  If the site I linked to happens to notice all the better.

Second, I have found via Yakezie and the PF blogging community in general that the promotion of positive relationships is abundant and many PF bloggers embrace such philosophy.  Selflessly helping others comes to mind around Yakezie but it really does extend beyond this network to the PF community in general.  I think the folks who attended the first FINCON ('11) learned this first hand.

So yes, giving out a link without a potential return may not give an immediate return – but more often than not, from my experience, showing your readers great content/information and reaching out to other blogs has little downside.

Ok, now going back to question of linking to authority sites from your article. I prefer those links to be nofollow. If you do internal linking and links to other bloggers, then the number of juice getting links should be minimized this way.

You really don't want to pass your juice to Wikipedia or CNN money, do you? I recently had a tax post, I made sure all IRS links are nofollow, and there are plenty of IRS links on it.

Ok, now going back to question of linking to authority sites from your article. I prefer those links to be nofollow. If you do internal linking and links to other bloggers, then the number of juice getting links should be minimized this way.

That defeats the purpose, no?  The point of linking to a reference is that it is important to what you are writing about.  If you nofollow links in an article, you are telling the SEs that those links aren't important.  So why would you link to things that aren't important.  That seems strange.

Glen Craig – Free From Broke said:

Ok, now going back to question of linking to authority sites from your article. I prefer those links to be nofollow. If you do internal linking and links to other bloggers, then the number of juice getting links should be minimized this way.

 

That defeats the purpose, no?  The point of linking to a reference is that it is important to what you are writing about.  If you nofollow links in an article, you are telling the SEs that those links aren't important.  So why would you link to things that aren't important.  That seems strange.

Purpose is for the readers to know more information. The other purpose is to pass link juice to my inter linked posts and my fellow bloggers post. That pretty much ends there. I want Google crawlers to think internal links are authority, not that other mega site. My obligation is to my readers. And my goal is to go up in authority myself. I can't give charity link juice.

Eric J. Nisall said:

But if you aren't showing the SE that the links you are referring to are authoritative, aren't you kind of defeating the purpose?  I see it as linking to another authority for the purpose of relating your information to another "authority" to show the correlation between your information and what the SE perceives to be an authority, thereby giving more weight to your information.  Shouldn''t it be both about giving the reader valuable information as well as showing the SE that what you are saying is important at the same time in terms of links.  Plus, if you don't dofollow the links, wouldn't you be burning the bridge so to speak, as you may be less likely to receive any future consideration from the mega-site (not in terms of the IRS, but actively managed blogs and informational sites)?

Agreed Eric. We must show that both the blogs/sites are related with do-follow links. SE gives value to both the blogs. If they are tagged with nofollow, SE can be confused with this. Hence, your blogs may not be considered an authority and the linked site will hog the limelight. Also, agreed with your last point… if we keep nofollowing all the blogs, we may run the risk of being tagged with nofollow for my own blogs too by other bloggers.. this will not leave a good impression with SE at all.