Strategic outbound Linking turn-ons and turn-offs

Regarding links, middle-low profile seo’s are likely to be excessively selfish with a centralizing vision. Many inbound links, few outbound ones. Wrong (as false as rooted) conceptions on Pagerank, the spasmodic search of “quantity” in place of “quality”, poor knowledge of the market, trading of links and, I would add, five grams of deficiency in subject of netiquette, have made the Outbound Linking (or rather linking external resources) a pleasant habit in environments like boards of discussion and blogsphere (and not even the ‘whole’ blogsphere) only.

Yet the advantages coming from a strategic use of outbound links, especially in search engines that give link-model a great role in their own algorithms, are really clear. A link pointing to a relevant external resource confers great authoritativeness to linking document. It doesn’t cause Pagerank loss and it doesn’t increase it (”Bouncing” Pagerank flow still has to be invented). However, proper outbound linking puts your document nearer (in web graph) to websites which are remarkable for determined contents, and this approach reflects in better rankings, especially -and above all - on Google.

Taken for granted the knowledge of certain ‘laws’ that regulate optimization for search engines (do not link spam site, don’t insert too many external/internal links on a single page etc), what is about to follow are some turn-ons (positively influence ranking) and some turn-offs (they don’t positively influence it, simple uh?) of strategic outbound linking.

Strategic Outbound Linking Turn-ons:

1. Deep Linking

Which means rather directly linking documents inside a website (not the main site url, as it often happens).
Just be sure that the main site is neither banned nor off topic. Then, look for the nearest document to yours, for thematics (complementary or similar), contents, quality of external links.

Help the engines to know and to visit quality resources; let your visitors go to documents they would never know if they only relied on search engines. Shortly, your visibility on search engines will considerably increase

2. Strictly On topic Linking

True that some links toward off topic resources are not able alone to slander a well built document. However it is also true that inserting only external links which are connected with the contents of the target page enacts the difference between an ‘average’ ranking and a ‘perfect’ ranking (comparing two documents, whose contents and inbound links equal).

Think about it, when you are tempted by gaining 5 bucks/month from Casino online links…

3. More contents, less links

Quality outbounds are not able themselves to make a remarkable, authoritative and well ranked document. If outbound links were the biggest deal of search engine optimization, serps would be overcrowded by web directories and social bookmark pages. In a congruous number, however, outbounds attest the expertise of the webmaster, they approach the page to remarkable zones of the web graph, consolidate the topic, improve positioning in search results pages.

Prepare unique contents, improve them with a correct use of headings (Hx..) and paragraphs (p) and, at the end, insert a series of deepening external links. For an average lengthed text, 5/7 outbounds are more than enough.

Strategic Outbound Linking Turn-Offs:

1. Linking Google’s serps.

Demential and useless technique which had a little effectiveness some time ago, now in disuse. Search engines send (with joy) traffic verse those websites that succeed in holding back the consumers, not toward those that (with no style) try to re-send them to the sender every 3 paragraphs.

2. Linking Wikipedia.

Seemingly an ethical vote, toward an ethical project, featuring ethical contents.

But, who links Wikipedia?

Lazy webmasters want to offer their consumers deepenings and some further references, but don’t know their market that much. Nevertheless “play-it-safe-seo” doesn’t always pay. At least, not on Google.

Selfish (and a little bit ignorant) webmasters that do not want to grant a link to an unknown guy/competitor, prefers to give it to an abstract entity as the well known collective encyclopedia.

In both cases a wasted vote, toward a site that either Google and the consumers already know and that doesn’t confer any additional value to your document.

If Wikipedia’s pages steal a place in almost any Google serp’s top ten, is also because of this bad habit.
And then, let’s forget demagogy and let’s say it once and for all: linking Wikipedia is evil!

3. Linking competitors which are better ranked on Google.

Almost useless if your goal is to undermine or to overcome them. There may be a little impact sometimes but, as nearly every kind of search engine optimization issue, this technique cannot be considered a ‘method’.
The only thing that is sure is you are advertising your competitors for free and magnifying the already-enormous Google’s algorithmic self-esteem (”Hey, they’re linking to those that I have put in top ten, so my serps are really terrific!“)

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