Don’t Be A Hypocrite With Your Outbound Links

So you want to get traffic to your site (through links and search engines), but you’re so paranoid about ‘bleeding pagerank’ or sending visitors away that you won’t link to other sites?

Heh, good luck.

It’s a well known fact that referencing other sites, especially authority sites and blogs in your niche is one of the best ways to build awareness of your content.

Lets use your blog as an example. You write and publish a killer post, with no links. Now, you’re so paranoid that you ‘never’ link out in any of your posts.

Maybe that post will show up in technorati if you’re pinging. It’ll be indexed by a couple of search engines, etc. But for the most part… silence.

Now, you write a post like the internet marketing link roundup one I published earlier.

When I hit the publish button, this blog sent a notification or ‘trackback’ to those sites linked I linked to. On some of the sites, there’ll automatically be a trackback show up in their comments section, basically telling the author and readers that I linked to them.

Some blogs have that feature turned off because trackbacks have ben so abused in the past, and that’s understandable, but even so, in those blogs admin panel, the author can usually see that I linked to them anyway.

Now they’re aware of me, and will most likely visit my site to check out what I wrote about them. They may subscribe to my RSS feed, my email newsletter, they may manually approve the trackback when they see I’m not spamming them, or they may become a loyal reader and freely link to something I publish in the future.

You’re building awareness when you link out, especially to bloggers.

Imagine a top 100 blog in your niche linking to you now and then. That exposure is priceless in terms of traffic and exposure of your blog, name and brand.

No let me ask you this: is paranoia of ‘bleeding pagerank’ or sending a little traffic to someone else really worth being stingy with your links?