Check out the risks and danger of linking to external sites. Be aware of these tips if you plan on adding external links anywhere in your blog.
This is the perfect post for me at the perfect time, because I’ve been experimenting with external links to see what would happen to my site ranking.
You’re going to want to pay close attention here if you plan on making money blogging.
What Are External Links?
If you are adding links to your blog posts or articles that lead outside of your site, those links are considered external links.
Do follow external links can hurt your blog rank and cause it to lose that free traffic you’ve worked hard to get.
My Experiment With External Links
I was following the usual rule of not allowing any do follow external linking and then I decided to try out several posts in a row with a few do follow external links to high ranking pages that were relevant to my post. The results were not good.
By the fourth post, my blog was losing rank and traffic for many keyword phrases. I knew exactly what was happening.
What was happening here for me can be related to someone telling you not to touch a hot pan on the stove. I just had to see for myself what it would feel like if I touched the pan.
I knew I was going to get burned, but I did it anyway. Sounds kind of dumb, but I just had to see for myself after reading about selling links and paid links.
If you link to external sites and don’t add the no follow tag to the link, you run the risk of looking like you are getting paid to add links to your pages, even if the link leads to relevant content.
Fixing Your External Links
I went back into the posts where I allowed the links to follow and I changed every link by either removing the link or by adding the no follow tag.
I then pinged the URL’s where the changes were made and within a week my ranking was back up to the way it was before my little burn experiment.
It’s okay to add links to your posts and articles. Just be sure you add the rel=no follow tag to the link, so your blog doesn’t get punished by Google’s algorithms.
If any of your blog post pages page rank starts to increase and you get any emails from people who want to pay you to add a link to the page, I would recommend turning down the offer.
I would avoid trading links with sites too, because it can have the same negative affect on your blog.
My External Links Rule Of Thumb
The best rule of thumb to follow when adding external links to your blog, is to make sure every link leading outside of your blog has the no follow tag added.
The only time I let a link follow anymore, is if the link leads to another one of my blog posts or articles.
I highly recommend linking to other relevant pages within your blog by using textual keyword phrases relevant to the content on the page and allowing the link to follow.
I like to keep a cheat sheet text document open with all of the HTML code I use when creating posts and articles. Within that cheat sheet is the “rel=no follow” tag that I copy and paste in the external links.
This video tutorial offers an explanation of how the no follow tag is added to the links that I don’t want followed.
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This post on external links is the last post in this top SEO tips and tricks series. I started this series several weeks ago. If you are trying to make money blogging, I would recommend reading the other posts in this SEO tips and tricks series.
You might be quite blown away at some of the tips you learn to help your posts and articles get ranked by Google.