Our company is mentioned on some high-traffic, authoritative sites and some of our products are linked as well. If we link to those pages, does it affect our SEO? How can we take advantage of those mentions?

[JonathonOhayon]

I heard that if you link to another site, when Google indexes your site, they crawl that page that is referenced. By whatever metrics they use, if that site has your name or a link to your site, Google would rank it higher.

I am not sure how true that is, but what value does another site mentioned our site have on our SEO?

[MickEdwards]

I think you mean the other way round.

If you have a new site and you get a link from an authority site the chances are that site page might (and it is a might) get crawled more often, which then leads Google back to your site and stands you in good stead for Google to crawl and index your site.  Other methods include submitting your sitemap to Webmaster Tools.

If good quality sites are linking to yours then that's great as it's telling Google your site is of value and will help with your rankings.  You do not want to link back to those pages, you want to go out and find more sites to link to you.

[danatanseo]

Hi Jonathon, Excellent question! I expect you'll get two or three opinions on this. Here's mine, but keep in mind, depending on your goals, it may or may not be the right thing for you.

Don't be a link hog.

What do I mean by that?

I mean, don't be so tight with your concern about leaking link juice (God I hate that term!) out of your pages by linking to another site. Instead, think about it this way:

Is linking to this other resource or site helpful to my readers/site visitors? Does the fact that you are linking to a valuable resource enhance the value of your content/page and end up making you even more authoritative than you would have seemed without it?

If the answer to that is "yes!" Than, by all means, link to that other page or resource and be polite and respectful and for heaven's sake make it a "followed" link.

On the other hand, are you linking to the other page simply as a conversational, maybe even a one-off mention, like a link to a manufacturer from an eCommerce site? or worse, is someone paying you for a link back to them? Or perhaps it's a link contained in a comment on one of your posts.....Sure, go ahead and link if you want to, but use the rel="nofollow" attribute for those types of links.

It's certainly a judgement call, but I try to look at things this way, if I thought highly enough of a resource to mention it or include it for my visitors/readers, then I probably should link with a followed link. Just my two cents! Hope that helps

Dana

[MickEdwards]

Excellent response and advice.  My only concern was Jonathon has the impression he "should" link to the pages linking to him by how I read his title.

So my advice based on that would be absolutely no as a reaction to gaining the link, then to stand back, consider and follow your advice.

[JonathonOhayon]

Thank you both for your answers.

I am still not sure, so let me add a little context: the NYTimes mentions and links to my company. In our blog we could reference the article and the point that is made could be valuable to our visitors. Is there a value to linking to that page? The idea of rel="nofollow" tells me there is, but I am not sure.

Ultimately, I agree. Our focus should be value to our customers. But, I would be remiss to not try and take advantage of such a valuable mention.

Thank you again!