Does placing links to related sites improve rankings?

G may think it is link farm.

 

Yes, it does. But a good way of having your cake and eating it too is to sell relevant links and actually earn money for improving your own rankings!

 

I'm not speaking about linking to a competetiors site.
I'm speaking from personal SEO research.

You can link out to anysite with any particular keyword... it does not help your site rank better regardless of what your views on the effects of PR are.

 

Myth's and confusions

Do outbound link helps: Yes, if they are used effectively. Using nofollow tag will not help.

If outbond link is an affiliate link: It wont help at all and may have some reverse effect. Need to add nofollow tag with these link.

Providing a link to similar resource help SE's and humans to find out more information about the similar resources. It should be used genuinely not to create any link farm

This also depends upon the site and it's theme. Nature of site has huge impact on this. Take an example of Web directories, Niche directories and blogs.

 

Its interesting that you mentions nofollow on aff. links. Why is it wise to use that ?

 

Well because if you are advertising for someone then it is very much possible that many times non-related and non-quality sites will show up on your website and it may hurt your SERPs so its wiser to use nofollow tags in affiliate links.

Please add to my repuatation if you liked my opinion.

Cheers

 

Small correction. It's not unquestionably wise. It's only somebody's opinion that it's wise. Nobody here speaks for Google or Yahoo. They speak only from their own experiences.

While some believe it's wise to use nofollow there's the tinfoil hat brigade who suspect that the whole nofollow thing is just a honey trap. A site that has nofollow obviously has some SEO thought (and effort) behind it.So, by using nofollow the statement you make to the SEs is not necessarily the one you think you're making

And that's only IMHO.

 

I will give you rep. either when you get more knowledge or can explain in a way I understand : )

 

<tinfoil>Putting nofollow on your site tells the SEs that you dont trust your link, why should they trust you ?</tinfoil>

 

Affiliate links may have an adverse effect on your rankings but using nofollow won't help matters. Nofollow only stops you passing your weight to the affiliate site - the search engines can still spot the affiliate links.

If a page has lots of affiliate links then google may assume its a crap page and one that isn't really useful to the visitor. Its better for google to send the searcher straight to the merchants site.

The way to handle affiliate links it by sending them through a redirect script and blocking that script using robots.txt.

 

Mong, again you are correct. It would be wise to follow this course. Look at the big sites with high PR and high traffic. The really good ones only have relevant outbound links.

Try putting a non related outbound link in Wikopedia and see what happens!

Col

 

You may want to take a look at this:

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=24968

 

Ya sure feel free to ask me any questions you want!

Cheers!

 

OK, my tin foil hat is stuck tight on today but if you think Google won't crawl something because you said so in robots.txt then you are sadly mistaken. They may not index it but it's safe to assume they've crawled, had a look, and stored a copy. It wouldn't hurt to work on the assumption also that they are parsing js and be prepared. If they aren't now they've made no guarantee they won't in future.

I totally agree with the first part of your post that the SEs can see the affiliate links even with the nofollow tag.

 

I agree that google can crawl it if they wanted to.

The solution (which I don't bother with myself) is to add some cloaking in the redirect script so the affiliate link is never shown to Googlebot or any of the google IP addresses.