Marketing Matrix: Is External Linking Good For SEO?

Posted by Cyrus Shepard

External linking doesn't sound like it's that difficult of a situation but for many SEOs there's an ongoing debate about how you should do external linking on your website. This week Cyrus, our web strategist, goes over two very different methods of handling external linking on your website. While there are benefits and problems with each strategy, we want to know what method you use and why! Feel free to leave you comments below and discuss what method you use.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Cyrus. I am the web strategist here at SEOmoz. Today we're going to talk about external linking, linking to other websites. A lot of people wonder if this helps or hurts your SEO, and it has been a debate that has been going on ever since SEO started. So today we want to look at the two different schools of thought and see what we can find out.

Strategy one, let's pretend you have a site about red boots, and there is this great resource about amazing red boots. You have to decide if you should link to it or not on your page. Some of the arguments for not linking to it . . . oh, there we go. That's a good marker. Whiteboard Friday fail there. So, you might want to just keep your link juice internal instead of linking to that page. Keep everything within your own site so that you are not passing any value to this page because you really want to rank high for red boots. You also don't want visitors to leave your site. You went to a lot of work to get that visitor buying those red boots on your site. Why would you want to send them someplace else? Kind of makes sense. You also don't want to help your competition. If you link to them, you could elevate them in the rankings for these amazing red boots, and then people are never going to find you. By the same token, it might hurt your rankings. If you are linking out to all these other great sources, you might be telling Google, hey, these are better resources than my page about red boots. So you might fall down in the SERPs.

This is a school of thought. We see it a lot. We see people mention your brand and you read the article and they don't link to you at all. They don't link out. Some people think it is very legitimate. There is one piece of information we have that casts a little bit of doubt of whether this is a legitimate exercise or not, and that is the correlation data between external links and higher rankings. The 2011 correlation data showed that there was a 0.04 correlation between the number of external links on a page and higher rankings. Now, it doesn't seem like a lot, but taken in aggregate with all the other 200 ranking factors, it matters. It doesn't prove that a lot of links on your page are really going to help your rankings. But one thing it does disprove is this one - that adding external links to your page is actually going to hurt your rankings, within reason. If you don't take this to extreme, we can pretty much cross that one out. So, that is one theory of thought.

Now the other strategy, the strategy which I think is probably a little bit more friendly strategy, is you're a page on red boots, you have all these great resources, and you chose to link out to them without fear that it's going to hurt your rankings or that you're going to be helping your competitors too much. The biggest benefit in my mind of this technique is its automatic outreach. We spend a lot of time as SEOs writing emails saying, "Hey, will you link to me? I wrote this great resource." Just by putting a link out to somebody, they see that in their analytics. They see that traffic. It is kind of like tweeting about somebody. They know that you linked to them.

So, if I write an article on, actual example, SEO copywriting, and I link out to Copy Blogger because they are a great resource, Copy Blogger actually saw that I linked to them. They not only tweeted about my article, but they linked back to me in their weekly roundup. So by linking out I actually got a link back. Probably not going to happen over here. Here you might get a ton of links. Every link that you put out is actually an opportunity for outreach, and it is as simple as putting that in your editor, and, of course, adds value to your content.

If you want to be an authority on a subject, it makes it sort of look like an authority when you are referencing other materials. If you read a book, an academic book without a bibliography or citing any references, you might kind of wonder where they got their information. So it kind of helps you to look better in that respect.

Now this is controversial. It might add contextual signals to your content. Google is reading your page, and the other search engines too, and they're trying to figure out what your page is about. If you are linking to a page around the same topic, some people suspect that may tell Google, oh yes, this page is about red boots. You can sort of think of it in the spam context. If you have a page about red boots, but you are linking to Viagra, Google's going to say, "No, this page is not about red boots." If you are linking to a page about shoes, tons of shoes, yeah, that might help. We don't think it is a big signal, but some people think it is significant.

The final reason that this strategy may work, you see a lot of successful SEOs do it. It appears this might be a good strategy. The thing you have to be careful about with this strategy is your anchor text. If you are trying to rank for red boots and you link out using that red boots anchor text, that is probably not going to help you. You have to be a little creative with that. So, red boots, this is a great resource, tons of shoes, colorful footwear. Those are the sort of anchor text you want to use.

I am not sure which method is right. I know I prefer this one, but a lot of people actually prefer this one. What do you chose? Do you have any thoughts about which method is better? I'd like you to share your comments in the comments below and find out what everybody thinks about this.

That's all we have today. Thanks everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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