Loading ...Many SEO practitioners ask this question and there is no simple answer, the answer relies on a host of situations as well as the nature of the sites you are linking into.
For instance, Affiliate Sites. These are site which have been defined as having no really content, instead they boast loads of banners and links. If they do have content it is generally linked to other sites with a URL that contains code that can be used to identify where the click came from. So, Affiliate sites are therefore almost exclusively made up of outbound links. While some people can make money from Affiliate sites, they should not expect a lot of search engine traffic from top search engines such as Google or Yahoo. As search engine robots look for lots and lots of content in their ranking algorithms, it becomes difficult to rank affiliate sites and they might even penalise or remove some affiliate sites from their index.
Another instance is Reciprocal Link Pages. In order to conduct Search Engine Optimisation and improve your rankings you need to exchange links with partners who have similar interests to you. Sites rely on reciprocal links in order to boost their popularity and page rankings, yet sites that have reciprocal links pages that contain tons of links leading to sites containing off topic or non relevant sites are not being ranked highly.
If you want to keep your rankings high, or if you want to bump up your rankings, it would probably be a better idea to find sites that are closely related to your topic.
Another danger of reciprocal linking is that you may find your site penalised if you agree to a site that gets banned later on from a search engine’s index. Linking excessively to a banned site such as porn sites or gambling sites who by their content alone and the shady methods they use to get linked usually gets them banned eventually, which will have a direct impact on you too.
A search engine looks at a link in terms of a vote in favour of that site, if you link into bad neighbourhoods you are at risk of tarnishing your reputation and endangering your rankings. Don’t worry though; a sprinkle of links here and there is not going to hurt you too much. You should periodically check your outbound links to first of all make sure they work and secondly to make sure that the site you are link to have Page Rank and are indexed.
Outbound links can either help your SEO or hurt your rankings
Excessive outbound affiliate links may harm your rankings, yet hub sites which contain as many links seem to do well. The difference between affiliate sites and hub sites is intent and content.
Affiliate sites are just pages containing outbound links while hub sites are a collection of specialist hand written content pages which contain links from very carefully selected websites.
Link to great sites where you can, do your research and approach these sites with respect, and it is not suggested that you link into a site without their permission.
Related posts:
- Reciprocal links: good or evil?
- Seven top linking strategies
- Don’t make common linking mistakes
- Why it is important to know who your competitors are linking to
- Linking up for success
Tags: Search Engine Optimisation, SEO Linking
Link to us
If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.
