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Linking to other websites

by ambetious
7 replies
Hi guys, I would like to ask a quick question and please forgive my innocence if this question has been asked before. The question that I have is that how good it is from SEO point of view to provide your readers with a link to other website for some information that is not available on your website. Especially when the other website does not know that you are linking to them and not using their preferred anchor text for this purpose. Thanks every one in advance.
#linking #websites
  • Profile picture of the author sanhal
    Originally Posted by ambetious View Post

    Hi guys, I would like to ask a quick question and please forgive my innocence if this question has been asked before. The question that I have is that how good it is from SEO point of view to provide your readers with a link to other website for some information that is not available on your website. Especially when the other website does not know that you are linking to them and not using their preferred anchor text for this purpose. Thanks every one in advance.
    Providing a link to another site is good for their SEO, not yours. It would be regarded as a better link for them if you used anchor text although Google would not give much weight to it if your site does not have a high page rank.

    It's fine to provide your readers with good information on other sites but also concentrate on building backlinks using anchor text to your site from high PR sites.

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  • Profile picture of the author mikeavery10
    Hey ambetious,

    The way you are asking for its not the ethical way of linking. Google may be penalized you for such a link without related content. Keep away to do such.
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    • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
      Where do people keep getting this stuff?

      There is nothing unethical about linking from your site to another site, whether you use anchor text, a raw url or even 'click here'. The whole Internet depends on links.

      As for helping or hurting your rankings, it depends. On one hand, a link out does leak a little bit of 'link juice' from your site to theirs. On the other hand, it's unnatural for any but the smallest site to have zero outbound links.

      You just have to be careful who you link out to. On one end of the spectrum, you might have a link to Wikipedia or one of the dictionary sites for a word or term definition. Definitely a benign link. On the other end of the spectrum, you could have links to sites about any of the nasty things most hosts disallow in their TOS (porn, hate, etc.). Definitely links that will hurt you.

      I think it's funny, in a sad kind of way, that people will bust their behinds getting other people to link to them, willingly or otherwise, while not wanting to link out to anyone else at the same time.
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      • Profile picture of the author Rick88
        Originally Posted by JohnMcCabe View Post

        Where do people keep getting this stuff?

        There is nothing unethical about linking from your site to another site, whether you use anchor text, a raw url or even 'click here'. The whole Internet depends on links.

        As for helping or hurting your rankings, it depends. On one hand, a link out does leak a little bit of 'link juice' from your site to theirs. On the other hand, it's unnatural for any but the smallest site to have zero outbound links.

        You just have to be careful who you link out to. On one end of the spectrum, you might have a link to Wikipedia or one of the dictionary sites for a word or term definition. Definitely a benign link. On the other end of the spectrum, you could have links to sites about any of the nasty things most hosts disallow in their TOS (porn, hate, etc.). Definitely links that will hurt you.

        I think it's funny, in a sad kind of way, that people will bust their behinds getting other people to link to them, willingly or otherwise, while not wanting to link out to anyone else at the same time.
        Absolutely correct John and I share your frustration with this misinformation being propagated. In addition to your comment I wanted to add that linking to an authority site actually helps your SEO efforts. This has been tested on a large testing platform (over 700 domains) and is consistent in A/B and Multivariate testing.
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  • Profile picture of the author TheInternet
    I can't remember the last time I considered the consequences of linking to useful off-site content.

    The benefit of linking to useful stuff is more links in (due to your own page being a useful resource) and social media sharing. That should outweigh any kind of reduction in search engine karma.

    Or put another way: You have to spend karma to make karma.
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  • Profile picture of the author Alexander K
    Some really good helpful points.

    One I didn't see, if you really care about not giving "link juice" use a no follow tag in the link. Then your readers can go to the website, but the search engines won't. Or, go with what Rick88 and don't use those tags. Do use a tag to pop the link in to a new window though, that way the person will still have your website open, could easily return, and while they are on the other website, it appears they are still viewing yours.
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