External linking on a company blog

[AMSVansSEOTeam]

This has been bothering me for a long time.

Our company has a sub-domain blog that gets a respectable amount of traffic but not a lot of SER. Most of our traffic comes from social shares (although we do rank really high for a few key searches).

The blog manager is convinced that providing external links to additional resources or source material "dilutes the SEO juice" for the blog. URLs are provided, but they aren't linked.

Attempts to sway her to the idea that external links are actually Good Things have been stonewalled.

Tell me I'm right and why.

[trickshotric]

Firstly I have no proof of whether or not it is good for rankings so you may want to stop reading now.

Having said that... My personal view has always been that if the link is going off to somewhere that adds extra value to what you are blogging about then it is worth linking to.

I wouldn't just put a link to the homepage of a industry relevant website for no reason.

Wouldn't the internet be an awful place if posts didn't link off to other insightful or funny points of views or videos.

If I was Google I would want to promote sharing of useful information so I think there would be a little algorithmic boost for sharing other sites.

Google says design your website for users, so I think it makes perfect sense. Why would you be punished for supplying good information?

....And for some further insightful reading see this link I just discovered!: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/5-reasons-you-should-link-out-to-others-from-your-website

[EricPratum30]

It sounds like your blog manager assumes the search engine algorithms have no intelligence behind them...like it's all a matter of gaming or following a prescription. Whether you're trying to preserve link equity or not, you have to consider what the end user experience is... just as Google and other search engines say they're trying to do.

As the bot crawls your page, it recognizes a URL (whether it's a link or not). Then, it asks itself, "Is it easier for the reader to copypasta a URL or to simply click on link?" The answer is always click, which is one check against you in the multitude of things search engine bots look at on your site.

Changing this one thing probably won't affect your rankings much, but it's lots and lots of little things like this that sometimes make the difference.

TL;DR. Tell your blog manager to stop making the reader experience worse.

[trickshotric]

It would be interesting to know whether making the external link a No Follow makes a difference or not.

In the users eyes it makes no difference if it is No Follow, whereas in Googles eyes they treat the the link in a different way, but do they treat the gesture in the same way!?

[EricPratum30]

Matt Cutts has an answer for that question.

watch?v=EnVEERmbdpo

[trickshotric]

I know it's quite off topic but just had a look at your site on Open Site Explorer. You have a load of anchor text to your site for the words "Viagra" and "<a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text" data-text="penis" data-id="9619270841">penis". You might want to look into that! (The bad links that is)</a>

Assuming your site is www.amsvans.com?

[AMSVansSEOTeam]

That's the root site - yeah - we've been disavowing a LOT of links lately.