Link Leak
To link or not to link?
Should your website link to other websites, or should it be an island unto itself?
A big concern of many businesses is that the typical web surfer will arrive on their website (however that happens), look around for a few seconds and then click on a link embedded on the site, thereby leaving their site forever… never to return. This is what we call link leak (or link leakage), a much discussed problem with our clients that isn’t a problem at all.
Of course, businesses want to have helpful websites which visitors see as informative and useful, so those people will return regularly (hopefully contributing to the company's revenue generation activities, one would assume). Linking to other sites has its pluses and minuses, but if done well, the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. Naturally, the problem is that far too many businesses try to take the easy way out and end up doing more harm than good.
Links Points
Search engines ranks websites on what is most easily understood as a "points system." You get points for linking to external sites and points for being linked to. This is nothing new. Of course, there's always someone out there who tries to warp the rules to their own ends instead of playing by the spirit of the game. The result is link farms, which are website groups that hyperlink between all the sites in the group in the hopes of increasing search engine rankings without pointing users to relevant external sites. The links tend to be as useless as scrolling marquee text, and so now Google keeps this in mind when categorizing and ranking websites.
Google has a patent on assessing the quality of outgoing links to external websites from your site. Bad links can result in site demotion - good links will result in better ranking. You are responsible to police your own links - use common sense!
Link farming—or, creating pages with dozens of links for no good
reason—is not only useless to visitors, which likely means they won't
visit again, but it's also annoying. Simply put: Do yourself a favour
and don't do it. A slap on the wrist by Google could mean fewer people
finding your site. And what's the point in that?
However, adding relevant and useful links to your website will help
improve your Google search rankings, even while you may be offering
visitors an easy way to go elsewhere. Let's face it. Web users have
short attention spans. If you can get people to sit still on your site
for more than two or three minutes, you're doing well.
The trick is to make your website “sticky.” That means people visit
your site, stay and even return at a later date. How this is happens is
simple in theory but not so much in execution (that's always the way,
isn't it?): Visitors find the core function and content of the site
useful, informative and maybe even entertaining. They like it, so they
return. A perfect situation.
Returning to the Tao of Google, it's for the best to follow an ethical
web construction philosophy. It's a karma thing, really. Do what is
right and good, stick to white hat methodologies, don't try to cheat
the system, and the ether universe will repay you in kind. It's a
choice between doing what is right and doing what is easy. Go for the
right way.
Here are some other tricks to think about;
- Validate all of your links periodically. Go through your site and make sure all the links work.
- Google suggests having less than 100 links per page. Don’t overdo it.
- If there is an authority on the subject, link to it.
- If you are using information which is “borrowed” from a source, cite the source (in a link, if possible). Not citing the source is unethical, inappropriate, illegal, and will get you demoted.
- Make sure the text of your link is descriptive. “Click here” is a poor excuse for linking text.
- You can set up your links to open in a new window. Although this is a dandy idea, many people use "tabbed browsing" (they open links in new tabs within their browser, so they can finish reading the page they're currently on), which negates the necessity of having this. There is also browser history: if your website is meaningful enough, they'll hit the back button and return to your site.
Remember that the goal of your website is to provide the visitor with a
positive experience in order to encourage them to trust you. If that experience
would be made better by adding a link – add the link. Don’t worry about
your ranking – worry about the experience of the user, and the quality
of your site. Google’s job is to get people to the best website. Focus
on having the best website.
Don't listen to Kevin Costner; people will not come if you build it. But if you build it and you can build a good level of trust with your visitors, you'll bring them back to your site again and again. Providing them with helpful links (in moderation, naturally) will increase their trust in your site. Go the other route and look like a link farm, and web users will abandon you for better alternatives. And then you've lost them for good. Think of your website not as a bucket to trap your ideas, but as a watering can to nourish the minds of your visitors.
Let your links leak!
