SEO: Navigation Part 4 – External Links
We touched on external links yesterday, but this one is so important that it’s worth mentioning again today. For those of you who missed the post yesterday, we were talking about internal links and how you need to choose your anchor text wisely. What’s that mean? Well, anchor text is the blue, underlined text that you click on. You know, the hyperlink itself. If you choose to make the words “click here” be your link, you’re wasting one of your big cards in terms of SEO. Instead, you should choose a phrase that’s important to your SEO strategy. If you want your page to be found for the term “external links” then you should choose to link to that page with hyperlinks that say “external links.” That increases the value of the receiving page that’s about external links in Google’s mind. If you always choose to link to your pages with poor anchor text, like “click here” or “check it out” then you’ll help that receiving page to rank better for those lame phrases.
Now here’s the trick to external links, if you’re wanting to help the sites that you’re linking to, then choose your anchor text wisely. If you’re not wanting to help promote the site you’re linking to, then choose any text you want. But, remember this, any time you create a link out of your site, you’ve essentially made a leak in your site where visitors can leave. But that’s not only bad for your traffic, it’s seen as a bad thing by Google. Google sees your link to another site as a vote for that site. But it’s a zero sum game. If you give a link to that other site, you essentially harm yourself in the process. Google removes some of your sites value when they see links out of your site. It’s a very complicated algorithm that calculates the amount of things you’ve done right and things you’ve done wrong in Google’s eyes. When they’re all done calculating your page’s value, you get what’s called a Google PageRank.
Don’t be confused by the name though. Here’s a little known fact. The term PageRank, isn’t intended to be a rank of your page, instead it’s named after one of Google’s founders, Larry Page.
To avoid having your page’s PageRank decrease because you link to another site, you can use the NoFollow tag. When ever you create a link to another site, it’s a good idea to use the NoFollow tag because it tells Google to ignore the link when calculating their Google PageRank. Essentially, you’re able to provide a link to any site you want, without giving up your own site’s PageRank. The link still works when people click on it so be careful because you’ll still offer a place where people can leave your site.
Chadd Bryant
