A client of mine recently had a misunderstanding about how links from her site to external sites affected her SEO, so links became this week’s topic.

Links: the currency of the web

From the web’s earliest days, links between sites have acted as both attributions and recommendations. It was considered good web etiquette to link back to a site when you referenced or quoted their work. The link became a form of payment for the use of their material. Similarly, a link to another site was at least an implicit recommendation that if you followed the link, you would find something of value.

The original Google algorithm incorporated this “link economy” brilliantly, and created the concept of “PageRank” as a way of measuring the importance of pages (interestingly, PageRank is not named for web pages but rather after Google founder Larry Page). According to an extensive Wikipedia page:

PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.

Links and SEO

Website owners quickly figured out that more links to their site equaled higher PageRank and a higher position on search results pages. This led to the rise of “link farms” and the ability to buy links to one’s site, for the sole purpose of boosting PageRank. While this tactic was successful for a time, Google has long since shut it down, penalizing sites that receive spammy or low quality links from other sites. Today, site owners need to be extremely cautious about accepting links from non-relevant sites. There is even a process within Google Search Console for disavowing unwanted backlinks.

That being said, links are still very important signals to Google when it comes to site ranking. Sites with high quality inbound links are more likely to rank higher, especially for competitive keywords. Google’s definition of high quality is largely based on relevance. If the link comes from a site that is related to yours in some way (same type of business, similar subject matter, etc.) the link is likely to increase your site’s PageRank. Essentially, that site is assigning some of their PageRank to you, through the link.

Building high quality backlinks is a largely manual process, sometimes called “off-site SEO”. You’ll need to contact other site owners to request that they add links to your site, often in exchange for you linking to them. Guest blog posts are another avenue for creating these links, as long as there is relevancy between the two sites.

What about external links from your site?

Contrary to popular belief (including mine before researching this post), outgoing links do not dilute your PageRank, if they are high quality links. According to this study by Reboot Marketing:

There are plenty of excellent sources of information out there about why you should be referring to reputable sources so I encourage anyone reading this to spend a few minutes reading these posts. Much of the online material on this subject insinuates that apart from the obvious positive user experience that linking out will provide, it may also be an actual ranking factor for Google (see ranking factor 32). In short, they theorise that linking out to authoritative sites appropriately and in the correct context, may actually help rank your blog or website higher in Google search results.

There is no reason to be discouraged from linking to relevant external sites when you want to attribute or recommend that site. And if you want to link to a site that you are unsure of, you can instruct Google not to follow the link at all, by including the “rel=’nofollow’” attribute in the link code.

My bottom line is, if it’s useful to the reader to have a link to an external site, put it in. External links can also be opened in a new tab, so that the reader has easy access back to your site (hopefully they understand how tabs work).

Links make the web go round

The web was built on links. The first “h” of “http” stands for hypertext, which is another word for link. Use them in your own site where appropriate and if you can get others to do the same for you, you’re likely to get that good “link juice” that boosts your SEO.

Until next week.