Debate about links - between on-page SEO and "social media" SEO

[dunivan]

Hey,

My social media SEO are I are in a bit of a debate (and have been for months.) They say only 3 LINK MAX in a blog post( and will link two of those links to the same place w/ different anchor text), and I am off the opinion that if its relevant, you have content on point, to link to it as it's of more value to the user that way.

Anyone want to take sides here? Not meant to be a slam on practices, just looking at the whole picture here.

Hope all is well and thanks.

[aristotle]

Do they give a reason for not exceeding 3 links per post? Also, does this include both internal links and outlinks?

Also, it's not clear to me how this is connected to "social media". Can you please explain?

[Planet13]

And how long are the posts?

I would say that recently I have seen a few pages of my own rank well due to the semantic relationship. The way I see it, the topics that I write about, google would EXPECT to see links to other topics. I don't go to the extremes that wikipedia does, but I do look at my top competitors and see if there is some sort of particular linking "recipe" that they use.

In the situations I have done that, I have seen improvements in the rankings and traffic.

It is time consuming because much of it is by hand and if by chance I delete (or merge) pages, then I have to go and un-link those links.

Hope this helps.

[dunivan]

They are the "social media" person, and sees blogs as part of that (syndicates the blog articles socially, doesn't seem to care about panda food.)

Says industry standards are "never more than 3 links in a blog" - all of our links in blog articles are internal links (relating news to our content, says not to link to a contact page, etc)

[dunivan]

@Planet13 - posts are ~500 words

[Planet13]

Ah... ok. My advice doesn't really apply because it sounds like you are just creating them for others to use so you get links back from them instead of actually trying to get direct traffic from google to those posts.

[dunivan]

No, again difference of opinion there too - I dont want to syndicate them, just put good blogs for people to link to, they are interested in syndicating and using them to build links.

Their way is duplicative anways, its the same content all over the net (which I dont agree with) they are getting marginalized in the SEO game (more blogs are now internal) but they still want to oversee the (blog) SEO of the articles.

[aristotle]

Says industry standards are "never more than 3 links in a blog"

Well I didn't realize that there are any "industry standards" for this kind of thing, probably because I don't know much about social media.

But from an SEO perspective, I don't think a three-link limit makes any sense. A site owner can usually find good uses for more than three links. For example, you could add some more internal links to strengthen the connections between pages (or posts) with related contemt, which should improve their overall Google rankings. Also, I firmly believe that you can also improve a page's rankings by addjng a few useful outlinks to other sites.

[Planet13]

I'm not a professional SEO person, but I have had a few conversations with them in the past. So take this next comment for what it's worth.

I think the few really good SEO people that I have talked to would laugh at the idea of writing 500 word blogs and then syndicating them for links.

Hey, it might work well... I don't know.

But the really good people I have talked to briefly about SEO, I kind of think they would laugh at the idea.

Again, I might be totally wrong about that. Maybe it is THE secret weapon and the really good SEOs pretend that it is ineffective to throw people like me off the trail.

And hey, some of them have even acknowledged that krappy links are working pretty well these days, too.

But just from the people I have spoken with, I just don't get the impression that they would bother taking the time to do that.

Again, I am a grasshopper when it comes to this stuff, and they are the Mr. Miyagis (I know, mixed metaphors), but that is just the impression I get.

So hopefully, someone who really knows their stuff will chime in.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

If they had a secret formula they'd be using it, not forcefully sharing it.

[dunivan]

@planet 13 - content syndication used to work, but with panda the risk is not worth it. Also, if it was some secret, they would have used absolute links rather than ../ or ../../

@sgt_kickaxe - i guess the link # is their special formula - I think it's BS