Does linking away from my blog help or hurt me?

Back in the day when I started building sites, we wanted to keep those visitors on the site as long as possible.  We tried to keep links away from the site on secondary pages.  Now the question has been asked, and challenged to some extent, about blogs.  Should you have links to other places on your blog, especially in your posts.

Unqualified, yes.

Linking to others, especially to other bloggers, will actually build and increase your traffic over time.  The visitor might leave you then, but they’ll come back.  If you had something for sale or whatever, they’ll come back.  The visitor will come back because if you are linking to something of value (good information, a special deal, etc) they will remember they found that info on your blog.  On the receiving end, bloggers love to be linked to.  We live for that.  I track every link to my blog and visit all the sites that link to me and leave a nice comment.  Often I’ll subscribe to their RSS feed too (if the topic is even remotely interesting).  This means I might have just made a new connection/friend and now I have another source of information.

So you link to a blog in your topic area, they visit, see that you have interesting content, subscribe to your feed, then you might get a link back.  See? Very simple.  It’s building that relationship I talked about earlier.

Some folks once thought and would suggest that you should have the link open in a new window or tab.  Theory being then your site is still there and people don’t have to click “back” to get to you again.  Turns out, people hate it when we bloggers do that.  My buddy Darren Rowse asked that question and got his answer as a resounding “No!  Don’t open a new tab/window!“.

Yikes, okay then, no more.

In essence don’t look at a link away from your blog as asking people to leave, think of it as building a larger network of people who will link to you.

Sphere It