Cooking Recipes Blog Links

[bjs2010]

Hi,

I am running an ecommerce store - cookware, bakeware, knives etc...

I have someone I know personally that is a writer and one of her blogs is about cooking - lots of well established articles with keywords througout.

Is there any harm in getting some inbound links from her blog on certain keywords? If so, should I limit the number of outgoing links per article she has? Any guidelines?

Thanks!

[KaneJamison]

Yes and no - you need to approach it conservatively.

Adding useful links throughout the website is fine. To be on the safe side, I would avoid using exact match anchor text frequently unless it's actually the page title. For example:

• A link on their site that says "best kitchen knives" pointing to your homepage at mikescookware.com is going to be bad.
• A link on their site that says "best kitchen knives" pointing to mikescookware.com/best-kitchen-knives/ is going to be better, but still pushing the line too far in my opinion.
• A link on their site that says "check out Mike's list of best kitchen knives available" pointing to mikescookware.com/best-kitchen-knives/ would be fine in my opinion.

After a certain point, each new link from her site isn't going to be quite as valuable as the first links were, purely from a link equity standpoint. However - each additional link could be providing value in terms of click-through traffic and actual visits to your site, which is just as important as any link equity that may or may not be passed.

As long as you're not dropping a link to your site from a significant percentage of the pages on her site, and you're mostly linking to internal pages of your site with resources or products rather than directly linking to your homepage, I think you're OK. I would go heavier on the resource/blog links than I would on product/category page links.

My end-of-the-day rule of thumb is that if it feels spammy to a stranger or looks like advertisements all through the site, you probably need to scale it back.