Analyzing Outbound Links: Who Are You Linking To?

• Posted by B Jones on December 26th, 2006 - Comment on this Post »

We’ve all probably heard a concerned mother tell a child “Don’t touch that! You don’t know where it’s been!”. Well, it’s too bad we as webmasters don’t have someone to tell us the same sort of thing when we decide to link out from our sites. “Don’t link to that site! You don’t know where it’s been!”.

I was just spending some quality time reading a great article from Jim Boykin on the subject of outbound links. He had some really great advice for analyzing outbound links.

Use MSN’s linkfromdomain command to see who you’re linking to, or who a prospective link deal site is linking out to….this methods is OK.

Though MSN is lacking slightly in the area of index size, and doesn’t quite as many links as say, Yahoo, the linkfromdomain operator more than makes up for it. It’s a great way to get a quick look at the sites you link to.

Jim Continues with another great method to find sites you link to.

Better yet, use the new/improved We Build Pages tool - The Forward Links Tool. Once you start this tool, just minimize the screen…let it run it course. After is loads the pages, and the title tags, and checks if it’s a recip link, (takes ~15 minutes to finish), it will then show you some nice summaries.

Google has hundreds of factors that go into it’s ranking algorithm, and outbound links is definitely one of them, and is probably weighted pretty heavily, so it’s a good idea to go through and make sure the sites you link to are somehow related to your site, and also are reputable. If they aren’t just use the nofollow attribute in the anchor tag, or even better (since I am not a fan of the nofollow) just don’t link to the site at all.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!