Managing outbound links from your website
Linking to other sites from your dental website? Points to consider.
In recent blog posts we’ve explained the function of links to your website from third party sources and also links between between pages within your site. In this article we will give a quick overview of the third type of web link; the outbound or off-site link.
You may wonder why we need to consider such links? Surely they are just ‘standard’ web links to other sites and don’t need any special attention? Well that’s not quite correct and, particularly from a search engine optimisation perspective, how we handle outbound links is actually quite important. To understand why a little better, we need to understand something called “page rank”.
Page rank – what is it?
Page rank was developed in the early days of the Google search engine as a tool to help differentiate and grade where websites appear in the search results. Page rank accrues for a web page when in-bound links point to it. These in-bound links can be considered as a vote of confidence for the target page and help to increase its page rank. In a very simplistic overview, pages with higher page rank tend to achieve better search engine positions than those with lower page rank. In reality, there are lots more factors which actually contribute to where a page appears in Google, but page rank, conferred by good quality in-bound links, is still extremely important.
Moving on, a logical extension would be that links out of a high-ranking page will also help to flow page rank to the third party target page – this is why it’s very important to gain links to your own dental website from good quality websites.
However, out-bound links from a web page are considered to dilute it’s own page rank and potentially decrease its chances of appearing well in Google. Consequently we need to be quite careful when designing websites that we do not include lots of outbound links without careful consideration. To do so would not only dilute the ranking potential of those pages but could, in certain circumstances, attract a Google penalty.
Why does Google sometimes penalise websites for outbound links?
It is well known that search engines do not like attempts to manipulate ranking positions and link abuse is one of the main areas which they scrutinise. Websites which sell links or exist just to provide back-links to other sites, for example as part of link networks, will eventually be spotted by Google and penalised. In fact a well known directory which offers advertising opportunities for cosmetic dentists was recently demoted by Google for this reason. That said, a typical dentist’s website is unlikely to be penalised in such a way as the odd outbound link is hardly an attempt to manipulate ranking positions.
Best practice outbound linking techniques
Now we know that too many out-bound links can actually be detrimental and if we sell out-bound links we can actually be penalised, how do we actually manage links from our own websites? This is the guidance we tend to follow when building new dental websites:
- the odd outbound link to a reputable website is not a bad thing and supports the natural flow of page-rank through the internet. However, we will limit this to one or two important links and typically not from key headline pages on our own site where we wish to preserve as much page rank as possible. It is said that one or two outbound links to good quality websites “tells” Google that you are associating with good web neighbours, which might be beneficial. However, there is no real proof of this.
- where a client wishes to link to a number of association websites or perhaps those of suppliers, we will selectively use the “no-follow” attribute on the link. This is a piece of code which allows users to click the link in the usual fashion but tells the search engines not to pass any link equity to the target site. Also, any site which offers advertising opportunities really must use the “no-follow” link attribute to avoid any suspicion of link selling and potential penalty from Google.
Summary
Links out from your website are not quite as simple as they might seem and need to be managed carefully for SEO reasons and, if you are an advertiser, to avoid link-selling penalties.
If your website is under-performing in Google, please call the Dental Media team on 01332 672548 to discuss a full SEO review, including in-bound and out-bound link audits.