External Linking: good or bad for SEO?

The main point in the article is about outreaching your possibilities. The author gives us two strategies which will help us to understand if external Linking is worth the pain or Not. An excellent example is mentioned showing a cor-relation between external links and higher rankings. Most of the successful SEO’s have already started practising the strategy. There is no doubt that external links are definitely and opportunity for outreach. A topic of debate would be whether linking to the competitors be a healthy gesture for the business. So Go ahead,view the article and leave your comments.

External linking doesn’t sound like it’s that difficult of a situation but for many SEOs there’s an ongoing debate about how you should do external linking on your website. This week Cyrus, our web strategist, goes over two very different methods of handling external linking on your website. While there are benefits and problems with each strategy, we want to know what method you use and why! Feel free to leave you comments below and discuss what method you use.

Strategy one, let’s pretend you have a site about red boots, and there is this great resource about amazing red boots. You have to decide if you should link to it or not on your page. Some of the arguments for not linking to it . . . oh, there we go. That’s a good marker. Whiteboard Friday fail there. So, you might want to just keep your link juice internal instead of linking to that page. Keep everything within your own site so that you are not passing any value to this page because you really want to rank high for red boots. You also don’t want visitors to leave your site. You went to a lot of work to get that visitor buying those red boots on your site. Why would you want to send them someplace else? Kind of makes sense. You also don’t want to help your competition. If you link to them, you could elevate them in the rankings for these amazing red boots, and then people are never going to find you. By the same token, it might hurt your rankings. If you are linking out to all these other great sources, you might be telling Google, hey, these are better resources than my page about red boots. So you might fall down in the SERPs.

Read the full article here:

Is External Linking Good For SEO? – Whiteboard Friday

Save time, do link building the right way

Link building can be the most tedious and time-consuming task of SEO. At least, that’s how a lot of people feel about it. Ever want to know how to scale link building to avoid the pitfalls of wasted time and effort? This week, Tom Critchlow from Distilled interviews Ross Hudgens, an SEO currently working at Full Beaker in Bellevue, Washington, about some strategies you can use to scale your link building and get more links with less effort. Hiring people with hustle is a big part of it, but using APIs and outsourcing development can help too (though some aspects of linkbuilding simply are not outsourceable, as Tom and Ross explain)

We built a tool internally that does a whole bunch, like a bulk lookup on the SEOmoz API. So if you’ve got a list of 200 URLs, you can plug them into the spreadsheet and get all the metrics back straightaway. So it’s like that kind of thing can just incrementally save all your guys time. Ross: Right. Tom: It’s like you think about how many times you have to query, go into Open Site Explorer and stuff. Ross: Oh, it’s huge. Tom: You can just save time doing that. Ross: Yeah, for sure. Tom: So little things like that, and then there’s a whole bunch of other tools, like keyword research and all that kind of stuff. Ross: Right. Building that proprietary. I mean, keeping your ear to the floor too. There are a lot of people doing great things in the tool world

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Scaling Link Building – Whiteboard Friday

Looking back on how Wiki started

The Wikipedia Model
June 22nd, 2011 – Posted by russvirante to Link Building 671 This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
As an SEO agency, Virante has always prided itself in having research-based answers to the questions presented by our clients. A year or so ago, I caught myself referring to the a site as having “a great looking natural link profile” without really having an numbers or analysis to describe exactly what that profile should look like. Sure, I could point out a spam link or two, or what looked like a paid link, but could we computationally analyze a backlink profile to determine how “natural” it was?

We dove into this question several months ago while trying to identify automated methods to identify link spam and link.

We dove into this question several months ago while trying to identify automated methods to identify link spam and link graph manipulation. This served dual purposes – we wanted to make sure our clients were conforming to an ideal link model to prevent penalties and, at the same time, wanted to be able to determine the extent to which competitors were scamming their way to SEO success.

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The Wikipedia Model