| Telling Search Engines what your page is all about - Importance of outgoing (outbound) links |
Telling Search Engines what your page is all about - importance of outgoing (outbound) linksYes, them outgoing links to relevant (and keyword rich) pages can help you rank as well. Sure incoming (inbound) links are certainly overwhelmingly more valuable in getting you the rankings, but not many realize that outgoing (outbound) links can help as well. How does it do that? Basically because the outgoing links "tells" the search engine what your site is linking to and thus in the end, what your site is about. How many food sites you know link to automobile sites? A more likely scenario is that a legitimate food site will link to other food sites or food-related sites.
Still not convinced? Just pretend you are a search engine, maybe like Google. Your job as a search engine is to provide relevant information and search results to your users. And to do that you have to figure out what a website is about so that you can rank it (and then display it) for some terms. So you send your little bots out to spider and then index that website. Let's say you found a few important keywords like "burgers", "hotdogs" and "cheesecake". But in all seriousness, how do you (as a search engine) really know that this site is talking about those things? Could they have been a spam site designed to trick you? Yup, you have to make sure they are legitimate and they are related to their keywords. So you check your database whether there are other sites linking to that particular site with the same keywords or something similar. You also check the link text (anchor text) on links to that particular site as well, correct?
Huh? What? Are you blind? Those are incoming links! Not outgoing links! Well, yes, you are right. But from the importance of incoming links comes the importance (although less of a weight) of outgoing links.
Again, put yourself in the position of a search engine and you are now attempting to figure out whether this site is really a legitimate site and whether it should rank for certain terms like "burgers", "hotdogs" and "cheesecake". And during your crawling of that site, you found several outgoing links. So being a good search engine, you crawled those links and discovered they too have the same or similar keywords in them. Hmm......how many spam sites do that - link to sites which has useful information for their visitors thereby driving traffic away from their site? Very few. In fact, most will link to other spam sites.
Spam sites or even "made for advertisement" sites want to keep their visitors on their own site or at least link to other spam sites. And if there are keywords in the anchor text? This is like helping the another site rank even better. Not very likely what a spam site would do, right? What will you as a search engine think of it?
Before I go any further convincing you that outgoing links are important, I will ask you a simple question. Which site you know have all the information you ever need? None. There is no such site out there. At the very least, some information is taken from some other sources, be it blogs, forums, educational sites or press releases. Even educational institutes refers to information from other education institutes. So how can a real legitimate site have no or very few outgoing links?
Simply, it just makes sense to have outgoing links. I would call them related sources of information. If you link to trusted sources, then search engines will believe that your site is relevant to the topic. And it is good for the users of the Internet on the whole. Of course there are a lot of SEO experts who disagree that outgoing links helps in ranking. But even if it doesn't, I believe it certainly helps your site's human visitors.
For directories, it is doubly important. Why? Well, a directory usually doesn't have a lot of indexable content (read text) for Search Engines to figure out what that page is about. Since the page has mainly links to other sites, having links to good quality sites related to your page topic will not only enhance your "trust" in eyes of Search Engines, they will provide a powerful way to show your directory's professionalism in sourcing for high quality sites.
No, I am not saying that outgoing links is the cure for low rankings in Search Engines. No, no, no. What I am saying is that outgoing links to related topics is a natural part of the Internet. And being natural is what search engines are looking for, right? So don't be afraid to link to your sources when it is needed. It is extremely useful to your visitors as well. However, you need to be careful of who you linked to. Avoid "bad neigbourhoods" like plague.
Other articles: Internal Links - How to make full use of themEffective Directory SubmissionIncreasing your Page Rank In DetailOnPage SEO For Web Directory OwnersLink Exchanges TechniquesAdditional Benefits of a High Page Rank (PR)Secondary Article Writing - Link BaitingSneaky Bastard's Way of Getting BacklinksTiny Preview and Screenshots for PhpLinkDirectory V3.2.0A Complete list of Directory ScriptsHow NOT to run a directory - a submitter's point of viewSome tips for the paid directory ownerHow often does Google cache your Site? A Project.Raising PR - Problems with paid directories and what to do.Our exclusive interview with Paul le Roux of WebWobot Search EngineGood Planning = Good SEO = Results!Article Writing for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)Forget keywords meta-tag and think keyword density! |
|
