Should you really be linking out?
There is a perception out there that linking out to high authority sites is a good website optimization strategy and will help your website perform better in the search engine rankings. Perhaps you’ve seen it where a website, down in the footer, will link to higher authority websites such as CNN or google.com. The SEOer or webmaster does this because they think it somehow increases their ranking.
Here at Melbourne SEO Services, we believe people are over exaggerating its effects. That is to say, in our testing, we haven’t seen it significantly affect rankings.
I think this myth may have arisen out of something Matt Cutts, from Google, talked about. He was asked the question, should you encourage people to post on your blog since you’ll potentially send links to other websites?
He suggested not to close comments in an attempt to hoard page rank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites, part of their system encourages linking to good sites. From this we understand that it’s a part of the algorithm, but we feel it’s only a very small part.
I think people may have taken this a little too literally and thought that Google will look at you more favorably if you link to “good sites”. As I said, we have done our testing and we couldn’t find any isolated examples where sites were ranked more favorably as a result.
If that’s the case, should you link out or not?
You don’t have to turn off comments or do smart linking tactics, like hiding links in JavaScript to try and hoard the page rank. This looks unnatural. The whole aim of the game in SEO is to replicate what happens in nature, and it’s not natural to have your website never linking to anything anywhere.
So, it’s ok to share but don’t link out expecting it’ll move you to #1.
Here at Melbourne SEO Services, our SEO specialists know what works when it comes to link building and on page optimization. Get an SEO quote today and find out the big difference SEO can make in your business.
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