Some site owners (blakhat and whitehat) are stingy with outbound links. They think that because the 1998 Google Algorythm paper implied that each outbound link bleeds pagerank, that this still applies today.
It does not.
In fact, our data and testing suggests that linking to 2-4 external subject authorities actually increases a pages credibility with the search engines.
How do you find subject authorities? For white hats, you should know what sites are relevant to your niche and link to them liberally.
For black hat seo, your site building script should include 1-4 links per page to subject authorities. Obviously, you want to automate this process.
These authorities could be:
1. Random search result from the top 50 Google results for the keyword phrases.
2. Links to the wikipedia
3. dmoz results
4. Old media news outfits (New York Times, Forbes.com . . . etc.)
Obviously, since you don’t want people clicking on these links instead of your PPC or affiliate program, you have several options. These links should be linearly (on page code) very close to your body text. However, you can uses the CSS to put the division with these links into cold zones on the page – or make them disappear entirely.
The white hat way to go is to use the CSS to put these links in a cold portion of the page. This article from Google includes this diagram:
The white zones are read least.
Here are two tips from Captain Obvious:
1. Don’t make these nofollow links – that defeats the purpose of linking to authorities.
2. Make the links target=blank so that if one of your surfers clicks it, there is still a chance that they will click on one of your ads too.
For the darker hats, you can use the following in your CSS to make a division invisible:
#important {Notice I didn’t name the division something that screams I’m a spammer like “hidden”, “invisible”, “hide” or “HeyGoogleThisIsSpam.”
visibility: hidden;
}
or
#body{
display:none;
}
or
#main{
display:block
}
As Herman Sherman pointed out yesterday, “you can always pop that css file in your images directory which so happens to be the same directory i always exclude in my robots.txt”
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