I've been working on improving the SEO of my website by building backlinks to my website from a great range of other websites across the Web. I'm always thinking about SEO whenever I add new content to my website. This is why I avoid adding outgoing links on my website. I've heard that it is good to have a lot of incoming links to your website, but keep the outgoing links on your website to a minimum. This is why I am against link exchanges and never get involved in those! However there are times when i link to another website such as when i write a blog post and reference another website in the blog post But because I try to keep outgoing links from my main domain (http://www.mywebsite.com) to a minimum, i thought that if I do need to add outgoing links on my website, perhaps I should do that from a sub domain. For example, anytime I need to add an outgoing link on my website, I could place it on http://sub.mywebsite.com What do you guys think about this? Firstly, will I upset my SEO efforts by adding outgoing links on my website in general? If so, can i avoid these problems by only adding such outgoing links on a subdomain? In other words, what is better? Add outgoing links from http://www.mywebsite.com/blog or http://blog.mywebsite.com/ I've tried searching in several forums for this, but all discussions about subdomains are usually about moving a website to a subdomain and what will happen to the link juice and PR - I'm not interested in this. I just want to know whether having a subdomain with several outgoing links is going to cause a problem for my main domain. Will it be a problem in the eyes of Google and other search engines?
Hi, Your post made me smile. Of course, if we all adopted this approach, nobody would link to anybody and Google would have to find another way to rank sites. I understand where you're coming from, but I think you should do what is natural. If you're referencing another site or blog-post, give them a link. Think about it from their point of view - you'd be a bit upset if someone referenced your site or work without providing a link. Being seen as someone who includes outgoing links in your blog posts will encourage visitors and subscribers to your blog, as these links will be detected by the site owners. As for providing links in a sub-domain, I'm not sure what you mean exactly. If you have the relevant content in your main site, but your links in the sub-domain, how would that be organised? It doesn't sound natural to me. Outgoing links in a natural context to sites that are relevant to yours and to your content will not be a problem to the search engines. Share the love, as they say.
Hi Paul, Thanks for your reply. I'm definitely ok with sharing the love, but I don't want to be taken advantage of by other websites and I don't want to disrupt my SEO efforts. That's why i'm looking into the subdomain idea that I had. The ideas is that it would benefit everyone, and hence share the love I'll try to explain the subdomain idea a little more: We have the main website: http://www.mywebsite.com Here you find the majority of the content, such as what our company does, the products that we sell, contact info, etc It's where people who are directly interested in our company, products and want to buy our products, would go. What I was thinking of doing is having a community section: http://community.mywebsite.com There would also be plenty of content within the community pages because I have a lot to talk about here. In fact, I already have this section on my website: http://www.mywebsite.com/community But it is really growing because I'm always adding new pages there and new information. My concern is that I'm adding so much on the http://www.mywebsite.com/community pages that all these outgoing links might have a negative affect on the rest of my website in terms of SEO. Hence, I thought I should move the community pages to the subdomain: http://community.mywebsite.com The community pages is where I recommend other websites to my customers, it's where I post news that is happening in the blogosphere or on the Web. Basically it's where i discuss interesting resources that my customers or website visitors are interested in. It is NOT a one page link list. Instead it contains valuable information with unique high quality content, and I already have a lot of people visiting these pages (based on Google Anaytics data). However it does contain a lot of outgoing links (because I'm sharing the love and those websites are getting traffic from me), so I was concerned that I was damaging the rest of my website from this, and thought a subdomain would be the solution. Other websites would still benefit because they keep their backlinks and get visitors. The question is, does it help my website by having a subdomain? I hope that is clearer. If you have any advice, it would be much appreciated. thanks!
Yes, you need more inbound links than outbound links, but that doesn't mean you can't have ANY outbound links. Quality links are what makes it a world wide "web" - people link to other stuff that's relevant/interesting, and visitors get great information. The key is to focus on what's best for your visitors. If you have a blog posting that includes a link that gives your readers additional, valuable information, don't worry about it. Doing something like that adds to the "user experience" (as Google calls it). The problem arises when you have boatloads of links that you've gotten in exchanges, that don't offer anything of merit to your visitors.
You won't damage your website by linking to other sites in a natural way. Back in the old days, when Google indexed only 100k of a page and its search algorithm wasn't so sophisticated, they suspected a page with more than 100 links to be spammy. They still recommend keeping links to a minimum, but for 'user-experience' reasons. They think that too many links might be confusing for the user. However, they do not assume that a page with hundreds of external links is spammy. Be natural, link to related and quality content, avoid selling links, swapping links, hiding links with 'display: none;' or 'left: 2000px;', etc, and you'll be fine. The subdomain idea is not a bad idea, but bear in mind that a subdomain is a different domain - the content is not seen as being part of your 'parent' domain.
I have always found that having an outbound link to wikipedia etc is great to help getting my website crawled, without the need to install any of googles tools
Hi, I believe subdomain links only go one-way links from your main site to your subdomain pass juice, but from the subdomain to the main site they do not. If you want people reading your blog to also visit your main site, why not just set up a blogroll widget to go on every page?
Thank you to everyone for your answers! I understand that outgoing links are ok, as long as they are relevant and enhance the visitors' experience. However, this thread has kind of gone in a different direction to what I intended, and turned into a discussion about giving out backlinks in general. Paul, I like your advice about being natural and linking to related content - this is what i'm trying to do already and I am not opposed to it. I just want to make sure I'm doing the write thing by my website. So no worries there. I am also very interested in your comment about a subdomain being a different domain - this is what I was trying to ask initially i.e. do search engines consider a subdomain as separate from the 'parent' domain. I searched for site:mywebsite.com on google.com. I found that google lists all of my pages including the /directory/ pages (e.g. http://www.mywebsite.com/product/) as well as my subdomains (e.g. http://community.mywebsite.com) If google indeed treats a subdomain as separate from the parent domain, why does the Google site: search show both in the results?
Sorry we strayed from the original thread, but in summary: Will I upset my SEO efforts by adding outgoing links on my website in general? No. I just want to know whether having a subdomain with several outgoing links is going to cause a problem for my main domain. No. Will it be a problem in the eyes of Google and other search engines? No Yes, Google will find your subdomains when doing a site search on the parent domain, but it will not find your parent domain if you do a site search on a subdomain. What you need to bear in mind is that many sites use sub-domains for creating completely separate sites (of course, they are never completely separate). Examples are the sites that offer free hosting with a URL such as http://www.yourphotosite.photosites.com/ (made that up, but you get the point). For this reason, Google cannot simply assume that the two sites are linked in terms of content. Edit: perhaps the photosites is not a good example, as the content would be similar! But there are many sites that offer a free subdomain and the content in the subdomain can be anything you want it to be.
Paul and everyone, thanks a lot for all your replies. This has definitely answered a lot of my questions
a subdomain is considered an entirely separate entity, feel free to outbound link away. That being said, as long as you keep it on topic and not unmoderated spam, comments and user interaction on your site will actually help you in the search engines eyes. Google in particular has a strong liking for interactivity on a website. They like to see users contributing in some way and blog comments are a great way to help yourself out.