Why Leak Link Juice?

I've written several times on this blog and the Cinnamon Edge blog about the importance of link juice for your websites and blogs.

Getting inbound links from respected and relevant sites is really helpful in boosting your own sites in the search engine results, and you can create some of these yourself by setting up blogs like this one.

There are some SEO 'experts' who say that you shouldn't put outbound links on your websites because they 'leak' the very link juice you've been getting from elsewhere with your inbound links. But it isn't quite that simple.

If it was, authority sites would have no authority, because all their link juice would leak away through all the miriad links to other sites. In fact, outbound links help your website, too, and they do it in two ways:

1. Google likes websites to be helpful and to give a good experience to their visitors. Links to useful information on other sites is one very easy but effective way of being useful. You don't have to rewrite the useful information on your own site and you can never be accused of plagiarising another site's content.


2. Your website's visitors will have an enjoyable and helpful experience when they visit your site so they're more likely to come back, suggest it to friends, and so on. They'll probably forget that a lot of what they learned was actually on another site entirely!

There are a couple of things you must do to make outbound links work for you.

1. Make sure you get any links to open in a new page or new tab so your visitor never actually leaves your site unless they actively decide to. When they close the new website (that you linked to) your website will still be showing.


2. Use the relevant anchor text in your outbound links, just as you would in your inbound ones. This tells Google that you're giving people a clear path to relevant information.

Finally, another benefit of linking to other people's sites is that they're much more likely to link to yours or find other ways to tell people about your site.

It's not quite clear how powerful outbound links are compared to inbound ones, and Google isn't going to tell us, but there's no doubt they do contribute.

And being a good citizen by giving your visitors the best possible experience can only help your business in the long run.

I'll talk about the myths and mysteries of 'no-follow' and 'do-follow' links and their possible impact on SEO another time!

Roy