Internal Links vs Outbound Linking

Been following a thread in the newsgroup alt.internet.search-engines called Crit My SEO

As normal turned into a flame war and so the internal/outbound linking discussion was lost, but it inspired a post.

The OP asks -

I’m trying for a more wiki style link structure and have nofollow loads of internal links to keep juice flow controlled.. anyone got any thoughts

Stacey from Jezsta SEO Services made this good point:

So you think your internal links are crap and not worth going to? Why would you do that? PR reasons? I suppose you haven’t heard the latest links that are related count real nicely as weighted text on your pages. You need outgoing links that are related to help your relevance also. The only things you should nofollow are maybe affiliate links and sites that are unrelated or not really needing the link per se.

Only to be attacked over and over again by a so called SEO web expert who thinks linking out is bad and shouldn’t even be discussed!

Last time I checked Wikipedia has loads on internal links and quite a lot of outbound links, though for quite sometime now they have rel=nofollow the external ones to help prevent link SPAM. Wasn’t like this all the time though, recall them adding nofollow then removing nofollow only to re add it later! During all this time Wikipedia has done well in Google SERPs so it’s doing something right with it’s SEO.

Many of my web sites have lots of internal links like Free Recipes site which currently only uses internal linking mainly because I have only one site like this, if I had more I’d link them together freely.

Finally got around to updating this site, upgraded to using WordPress as the backend and in the process of adding over 100,000 recipes (up from 11K). Currently at 35,000 recipes and I think WordPress is struggling with the database size so might not get to 100K!

Now that it uses WordPress I was able to very easily automatically internally link around 300 relevant keywords: whenever a keyword is found for the first time on a page within the main content it’s turned into an internal text link using the keyword replaced (use the same concept on this site so most internal links in this post are automated).

Will probably add a couple of hundred more internal linked keywords like this long term because linking (internal and outbound) increases Google rankings a lot due to Google giving the anchor text of links on a page more weight than standard body text (also the links help the page they link to as well).

What this means is if you have a page about Internal Linking you should link from it with the anchor text:

Internal Linking
Internal
Linking
Internal Link
Internal Links
Link
Links

Note related words like Link and Links help with Linking SERPs.

But not only that you also want related phrases for that page to do well, so you might want SERPs like-

Google Internal Linking
Outbound Links

And so having the words Google and Outbound as anchor text will help with these related SERPs.

Outbound Links

I don’t like linking out freely to related sites I don’t own since it gives that site a boost as well and I’m not one for helping the competition for free

So I try to link to my own pages with relevant keywords first and link conservatively to other related web sites. For example I have 4 sites that cover SEO to some degree and so makes sense to link those together.

Google AdSense Templates (sells AdSense/SEO themes) which links internally and with several of my other SEO related sites like SEO and Affiliate Marketing which has some free WordPress AdSense/SEO themes(yes it’s reciprocal links and lots of them) and if a link has relevant text (internal/outbound) it will help that pages rankings (and the one it points to).

You can see they both do quite well for searches like “AdSense Themes”

http://www.google.com/search?num=30&hl=en&rlz=1T4HPEA_en-GBGB242GB242&q=AdSense+Themes

3rd and 4th domain listed are mine and freely link together.

Nofollow and Outbound Links

Note: Google changed how it treats nofollow since I wrote this article (everything else in the article is still true) nofollow now (2010) damages a sites SEO quite badly. When nofollow was first introduced by the major search engines a nofollow links would pass no link benefit/PR and the links benefit that would have passed through the nofollow links was shared between the do-follow links (internal and external). Currently Google DELETES the link benefit of nofollow links, making nofollow one of the worst possible things you can have on a website SEO wise!!

Like I said I don’t like linking to sites I don’t own (selfish that way), but you can still benefit from the anchor text of outbound links without having to use PR on them. If you view source of this page you’ll see all the Google search links are rel=nofollow (not wasting PR/link benefit on a Google search!).

The Google search result below helps show that nofollow links can still help the page they are on due to the anchor text (it’s not ignored by Google).

http://www.google.co.uk/search?num=30&hl=en&rlz=1T4HPEA_en-GBGB242GB242&q=%22Dictionary+of+the+History+of+Ideas%3A+Classicism+in+Literature%22+&btnG=Search

You’ll note the word ideas is used once on the Wikipedia page that’s number 1 for the above SERP and is part of a nofollow outgoing text link (under the External Links section). Classicism is used once on the page and is used as normal text. Basically there is only one place on the page where you’ll find this exact text.

Google has used the anchor text from a nofollow text link and associated text to rank that page for this highly specific search.

This means IF you added dozens of outbound links to relevant sites, but nofollow them you would at least gain the benefit from the anchor text of the nofollow outbound links with out the PR cost of an outbound link.

This does not prove the text gains the same weight as anchor text of a link without rel=nofollow (haven’t been able to determine a test that shows conclusively either way). For now we can be sure the anchor text of nofollow links is not ignored by Google for ranking purposes and MAY be given the same weight as a normal text link.

Personally I find using nofollow this way steps into the greyhat SEO arena and so something I’d not do excessively (I occasionally nofollow a related link to a competitor for example). The risk of using links this way has got to be very low since sites like Wikipedia do well that way, so would be a bit hypocritical of Google to ban sites for this type of SEO.

You’ve also got 90% of blogs using this technique on comments, most blogging platforms now automatically nofollow all links added to comments. So pretty obvious Google can’t automatically penalise sites for excessive nofollow use.

That said use rel=nofollow on outbound links with care, a Google manual review of a site with hundreds of nofollow links that are clearly added by the site owner may not get by their quality guidelines. It’s one thing having links added by anonymous posters to Wikipedia and blog comments being nofollow by default and a webmaster adding them to their own content for ranking purposes.