External Linking Best Practices Question

[RezStream8]

Is it frowned upon to use basic anchor text such as "click here" within a blog article when linking externally? I understand, ideally, you want to provide a descriptive anchor text, especially linking internally, but can it negatively affect your own website if you don't use a descriptive anchor text when linking externally?

[Ci3reR]

I don't think it will have a detrimental effect to our own website. However, I would like to see from other point of view: having a descriptive anchor text to external links may help your website campaign.

Descriptive anchor text is after all aimed to persuade / impulse our visitors to click on the link. If it's not really appealing, then they probably won't bother to click.

Given due to external links, making our visitors clicking the links will definitely bring benefit to that outsourced links: traffic. However, if those website are critical (and ethical enough), they will notice than some of their traffics are referred from your site. Moreover, if your site has even bigger influence to theirs, they will start investigating your site, whether yours is legit, content-related, has good credibility, etc.

If positive, then they may acknowledge you better and may even propose a mutual co-operation / agreement in the long terms.

That's just my opinion though however

[toddmumford]

It wont negatively affect your website, but people are visual learners and skim content online, and providing a visual cue as to the precise nature of the link they are following from your website might build more trust to you ultimately in your visitors' eyes.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

It all depends - if you were to create 100 external links, each with a back-link that said "click here" and they all were linking to the same page, it takes on an unnatural feel and at that point, Google might cast an eye over what you are doing.

Remember, Google looks for diversity in link pages and anchor text. They also look for links to (ideally) form a natural feel as part of content.

Keep it realistic and you will be fine.

Andy