Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
G) Outbound Links:
From every page, link to one or two high ranking sites under that particular keyword. Use your keyword in the link text (this is ultra important for the future).
My question is does the outbound link have to be on homepage too? Also does it have to be to another relevant site?
Or can it be lets say pointing to a site that offers internet service such as a counter or hosting company etc....? Or does it have to offer a service to the user/customer?
Finally can someone show me an example of how this link with keyword in text should look like?
Thanks!
2. It has to be relevant to the context of the page. If your page is about classic cars there would be no point in linking to a site about ink jet cartridges for example.
3. The link should be something like this ... <a href="http://www.thesiteyouarelinkingto.com">The linking text</a>
From every page, link to one or two high ranking sites under that particular keyword. Use your keyword in the link text (this is ultra important for the future).
One of the great SEO calls, (IMHO)
I'm not disputing this, but do we have any indication from google (or googleguy, or anyone affiliated with google) that this is actually the case?
From every page, link to one or two high ranking sites under that particular keyword. Use your keyword in the link text (this is ultra important for the future).
Although I have found Brett's article very useful, I have never followed that suggestion but had and still have great results without it.
I always avoid linking to off-site links from the home page.
Just my 2 cents...
Link where relevant, link with moderation and link with good anchor and pass good karma.
If you've got a good site, every little bit helps (karma more than PR at times). If you're in a hyper competitive area... forget about the 12 month guide.
I personally don't link out to sites which have characteristics of a bad SEO.. thats about it.
Bad SEO:- Just got a link request from a MAJOR manufactuters european site. We're talking about a billion plus dollar operation here, from their SEO who offered me a link from their SEO purposed directory on some unknown hyphenated domain in exchange for a link from one of my better sites. Their sales pitch "3 way linking is cool". The email came from a gmail address.
That tells me that they pay attention to your link network, so I do my best to make it easy for them and link to quality websites that are good for my users and are on topic for that particular page.
LOL
This is nothing but speculation, just like every other post in this forum. I'll probably be banned again for saying this, but it's clap trap.
... no ... I'll resist the temptation ;)
Recently I found additional benefit from Google granting outbounds - on some of my key terms my site ranks #1, while several spots on the first 10 SERPs are sites linking to me, with snippet from my site description. They obviously gained their positions because they linked to me with proper keywords in anchor text, as they don't use these keywords too frequently. And this way I have more than half SERPs in top 10, without doing anything against guidelines.
Just have a doubt that if we link other sites with good text then it should help those sites instead our..
If you link to the known related authority sites, Google sees your anchor text as more info about YOUR page too and gives more value to it.
but do we have any indication from google (or googleguy, or anyone affiliated with google) that this is actually the case?
I don't think anyone's officially said it, but many people on this forum have tested it. If you don't believe it, then test it yourself, if you do a proper test, you'll find that outbound linke clearly have some value. I haven't tested enough to figure out exactly how much weight they carry in the current landscape, but am content enough to know that they deffinitely are a factor.
It's probably not the best strategy to wait for Google to give us all the information we need to help us rank well. Read, listen, hypothesise and test. If you're not sure about how much weight something carries, test it out. If you just want to know whether something works or not, again test it to see. You'll probably learn a whole lot and be better prepared to flex with changing algos.
If you link to the known related authority sites, Google sees your anchor text as more info about YOUR page too and gives more value to it.
I hope so, I often do it, and sometimes I'm afraid it's too easy - do a search on Google for targeted phrase and pick a site from top 10, looking as official as possible, with high PR and DMOZ listing if possible.
leading to shallow content websites with lots of links out.
Like all those psuedo-directory, made for adsense sites? A lot of those seem to rank quite well these days, and for the perceptive observer might serve as an example of the power of outbound links.
WBF
With all due respect to the "Classic" SEO folks, we need to keep in mind that what might had worked PRE Allegra/bourbon could be at present a yesterday newspaper telling yesterday news.
And at the end.. assumptions and qualified guess are in reality all what we have been left with. ;-)
I agree with you. The game has changed. It's purely a guess, but IMHO a site that uses too many of what were previously pefectly valid white-hat SEO techniques may now be considered as over-optimized, i.e., an unnatural site.
Except for major players like the BBC, linking out to authority sites from every page would for most sites be extremely unnatural - only a SEO would think of it.
And at the end.. assumptions and qualified guess are in reality all what we have been left with. ;-)
That's not all we're left with, not by a long shot. That's where we start. From there proceed to testing. I had just updated some outbound link text to improve a page's ranking before my last post and it worked fine for me in this post-bourbon world, bumping up the page a few spots exactly as I had expected. If other people's tests show different, then I may have to expand the scope of my testing, but so far I'm pretty confident in my approach.
Except for major players like the BBC, linking out to authority sites from every page would for most sites be extremely unnatural - only a SEO would think of it.
Every single blog out there also very naturally links out to other sites. Any well written review of products will normally link out... The list goes on. From my perspective, linking out is a sign of a more natural page, especially with so many people still hung up on PR hoarding.
From there proceed to testing.
I think testing works well for AdWords and AdSense, but really doesn't tell you that much for SERPs. If you took any statistics in college, you know that controlling the variables that can affect the results and conclusions of any test is one of the big keys. And you just can't do it with SERPs. You don't hold the control, the engines do.
So, let's say you only change one thing on your site (one variable), which is correct from your end. It's the way to do things, so any change in results can be attributed to the variable you changed, and not some other variable in your control. Textbook scientific method. BUT, there isn't anything you can do to control for the huge mass of variables on G's end - which also affect your test's results.
Also all 3 go to my own sites.
All of these ideas are just tinkering around the edges (presupposing them to be anything other than educated guesses of course).
All you need is good original content, H1 title and relevant file extension, no messing about or black hat.
All the rest is down to IBL's!
Ultimately IBL's and anchor text are all that really matters
Fair enough if you're a site on specialised knowledge and link to others in the same field to bring more depth to your reader, but when you're just selling a bunch of widgets and trying any trick around to rank higher, it seems like an abuse of the concept to me
The biggest value of Google is that it perfectly provides us with sites with specialized knowledge helping us in our work, and G SERPs are very accurate in these kind of queries.
If someone uses G to look for shopping stuff, there is no way to avoid garbage. Is there anyone in this community who can define what site should be #1 in commercial search? I search for "blue widgets online shop", what site should be #1 - with smallest prices, longest warranty, or more established one? There are no impartial rules for product search, except that scrap affiliate sites and illegal sites should be rid of.
If I look for a product, I'd like to see a site with detailed information, perhaps links to PDF product datasheets, several links to other informational sources and several links to recommended online shops selling this product. Finding just shops in top of the SERPs is annoying, because it takes time to decide which one deserves to order from, while having a site with links to selected few online shops makes decision easier.
If a junk pages links to an authority page, the junk page just did get more valuable. It's not abuse of anything. But it is up to the engine to decide that junk + plus a good link still equals junk, even if microscopically better.
That's what I've been thinking about for a long time. Making outbounds important, Google changes the web, because it enforces junk sites to include valuable links, what makes them junk no more! If I look for a good site about widgets, and find a scrap trying to sell me cheap widgets, but including a few links to best sites about widgets, it's not so bad site, because it has very valuable information. I can even bookmarki this scrap site because it contains the best collection of links about widgets.
My most successful and best ranking site, which has hundreds of #1 matches for 2 word searches, has only got 3 OBL's in total!
It does not prove that if you added more quality OBLs, your site wouldn't do even better. OBLs are just one factor out of hundreds used by Google.
you know that controlling the variables that can affect the results and conclusions of any test is one of the big keys.
Sure, that's 100% true if you want completely accurate results. But I'm not that bent on quantifying the variables to any accurate degree, just identifying the ones that seem to have "enough" pull. For that, you just need a large enough body of evidence to allow you to make reasonable inferences. I'm not advanced an SEO enough to need to pin down exactly how much each variable is worth. For my skill level, I just need to know whether a variable matters or not.
It is deffinitely true that you can't isolate all of the variables when you're testing SEO, but you can isolate quite a few if you're encouraged enough. The kind of restrictions you're talking about are important to mention. However they really only come into play if we were trying to line up all of the variables on a scale of importance, determining which variables matter more than others, but for most people, knowing that something has a positive effect is usually good enough.
