Are Your Links Causing Leaks?

It's useful to think of your blog as a bucket, and your search engine visibility as a valuable liquid that it contains.  When you link to another blog or website, a little bit flows out of a hole in your bucket into theirs.  When someone links to you, a little bit comes back.  The bigger their bucket (i.e., the more popular the site that links to you), the more liquid they have to send your way.

Of course, this is not to say you should never link out to the blogs you read.  There is much more to be gained through relationships with other bloggers and the chance they'll return the favor than is lost through your linking to them.  What's more, a few links to related blogs and sites can actually help your search engine rank, by showing search engines what types of sites you consider to be related to your blog.

By the same token, linking to your own posts is helpful for the purpose of sending a little liquid their way, but the net gain is small since it comes from another post's bucket or that of your own homepage.

This is to say, though, that you should plug your leaks.  And by leaks, I mean unnecessary links, especially those on the front page of your blog, that do you little good.

The easiest way to plug the leaks is to delete them.  For example, that link on your sidebar to your favorite band's website could probably go.  But what about links that you don't want to delete, yet also don't want to send any precious search engine love their way?  Say, for example, a link to your disclaimer or list of sponsors, or an affiliate link.

Enter the "nofollow" tag.  The subject of a lot of debate and scrutiny in the SEO world, the "nofollow" tag is nothing more than a little piece of html code you can add to your links that tells Google (or others) to ignore it when determining your rank.  For example, the links people leave in your comments section are automatically nofollowed by most themes.

There's some disagreement about how well it works, but I figure it doesn't hurt to nofollow advertiser and affiliate links and links to certain static pages on my blog that I don' t care about search engines seeing.  But I wouldn't get in the habit of nofollowing links to other blogs.  If you like it enough to link to it, you shouldn't mind helping its search engine rank.

To use the "nofollow" tag,  just change your html code from, for example,

"<a href="http://www.healthbloghelper.com" target="_self">Health Blog Helper</a>"

to

"<a href="http://www.healthbloghelper.com" target="_self" rel="nofollow">Health Blog Helper</a>."

Of course, you would never nofollow your Health Blog Helper link, right?

If you don't feel comfortable editing your html code, the Wordpress plugins like Nofollow links can help.  A final thought on "nofollow" — don't go crazy with it, stressing over plugging every single leak on your page with a "nofollow" tag.  That's not what it's designed for, and you'll likely make a mistake that causes more harm than good.

A few more tips about links:

• Try to avoid having two or more links to the same place on the same page.  This lessens the effectiveness of the link out, and does no favors to the linking post either.
• If you're going to have a blogroll, don't make it so long that your page looks like a link farm in Google's eyes.
• Linking out to popular pages is better for your SEO than linking out to unpopular pages.  (Of course, the unpopular ones are the ones that need it most, so keep this in mind!)
• Write strong anchor text in your links.  More about anchor text in my previous search engine optimization post.
• Circular links, links from posts to other posts that link back, are helpful for SEO.

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I learned almost everything I know about search engine optimization from Wordpress SEO Secrets, and increased my daily search visits from 30 to 370.  I highly recommend it to anyone interested in doing the same.