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

Online Marketing 7 - Link Building

The most important thing for your website is to get it noticed by the search engines. So you certainly won't hurt your cause by submitting your new site to Google, Yahoo and Bing. Most of the smaller search engines take their info from one of those big three, so that will help anyway.

Then there's YouTube and the other video sites like Vimeo and Google Video, which we'll look at another time. YouTube, by the way, is now the second most popular 'search engine' after Google, at least in the UK...

But submitting your site doesn't guarantee that Google will even index it (add it to its list of billions of sites), let alone give it a good ranking and a high position in the search results.

So you need another strategy to make the Google spiders find your site, and that's linking from sites that Google already visits. The more popular and dynamic a site, the more often Google will visit it. That equates pretty closely to the site's PageRank and that gives increased value to any relevant links from that site.

So, build your links from sites that Google already likes and visits often. You can see when a spider last visited a site by clicking on the 'cached' link for that site in the search results. The more recent that cache is, the more often Google probably visits.

But just linking once, even to a very popular and active site isn't enough. Google has now publicly stated that recent links count far more tan older ones. Indeed, very old links are pretty much ignored. Which means you need to keep adding new links and renewing or replacing old ones to show them that your site is highly sought-after and that people are still keen to link to it (even though it's you who actually adds the links).

On that subject, it's likely that links added within the content of another site - ie, by the site owner - will one day count for more than those added by visitors or users, but I haven't seen Google say that yet. It probably isn't easy to discriminate between 'owner added' and 'user added' links but I wouldn't put anything beyond the geeks at Google!

So, it's probably going to be worth actually talking to website owners and negotiating an embedded link, but for now, keep building your links from any relevant site you can.

There is software available to automate much of the link-building process and we'll look at that in the near future. Meanwhile, try to add a few backlinks each week, as a minimum.

Roy