Thoughts on out-linking

Many internet marketers advise against outlinking as it provides an opportunity for visitors to leave your site. The idea is to get people to stay on your website as long as possible by reducing the number of doorways for people to exit. With billions of web pages competing for only millions of eyeballs, this would seem like a reasonable advice.

The other school of thought is to link freely to other sites, without regard to how long people are likely to stay on your site. The idea of not linking to other sites is contradictory to the spirit of the internet.

So what is the correct approach?

I suppose it all depends on the nature of your site. For commercial site, you only compete for people’s eyeballs but also their pocketbooks. Therefore, it’s prudent to avoid linking to other sites unless when absolutely necessary. If you own a network of sites, link it to another one of your sites ensures that the potential stays in your network.

For informational sites such as blogs, the rules becomes less stringent. If the main objective of the site is share information, one should be less stingy about linking other sites. On this blog, for example, I have no qualms about publishing other people’s articles (along with links to their site) when I feel that they would be useful to my visitors. Of course, I’d rather have you reading my blog rather than someone else’s, but if you adopt the view that your blog is a hub to share idea and connect with other people, you should not be stingy about linking to other sites. If your motive is simply to share and socialize, rather to preach or stand out as an authority on some topic, you may win more friends by adopting a spirit of sharing.

That’s not to say that you should go overboard with outlinking, even for an informational site. That there are billions of pages on the net does not mean that they should all be looked at. A good rule of thumb is to link only when you feel that the resource can enrich, deepen or broaden your visitors’ understanding without overtaxing their brain cells. From an SEO standpoint, excessive linking dilutes the value of each link on a page, and if you are trying to make some money selling text links on your blog, some advertisers may be turned off by them.