Is Linking Websites To High-Authority Websites Helpful For SEO?

1. You can embark on improved reputation

When you include links to third-party websites of high authority and name in the process, by doing so, you are perceived as a reputed brand in the eyes of search engines and the target audiences.

Since people, today don’t have time to explore ten different websites for solving their queries so by providing shortcut links to those users on your website, you can save their time and sketch your image as a reliable, authoritative and subject-matter expert brand.

2. You get great backlinks

By creating external or outbound links, you create a powerful association with the other reputed companies, websites, bloggers, journalists. When you will endorse other website’s efforts on your site, in return, you will be endorsed too in the form of effective backlinks. The more backlinks you score, the more will be your SERPs ranking.

The important part - Those backlinks created will not help you in getting the direct traffic (as only a small percentage of public taps on those backlinks), but the ranking you will get from those backlinks, that will be the real win.

3. The external links increase the relevancy of your brand

You have no idea how your single linking can improve your SEO game. By putting right external links, the Google algorithm can learn a lot about your website, with a single linking, the search engine crawlers will know:

• What industry you are in
• What user query or problem statements you are aiming to solve
• Your type of competitors
• How much your page is valuable upon users online searches

When you put links to high-authority third-party sites or pages, you win the trust of the search engine regarding “that yes you are a legitimate player of the industry you are in ''. Thus, you get great relevance in ranking high in the SERP.

4. Your site becomes a more valuable and scalable resource for end-users

Doesn’t matter how exceptional a website you plan to make, there would still be a bunch of readers who won’t find your website’s information or content to be adequate. And it is natural. Since you can’t make your website a global depository, that is why you need to leverage the “power of external links”. 

The links will make your website a more valuable and scalable resource as linking will add on to make your website experience better and more rewarding for the visitors. By practicing the linking process, you will become a valuable reference resource in your business niche.

1. Make sure your links open in the separate tabs

These external links drive people away to other third-party sites, to ensure your site doesn’t get completely abandoned by the user, make sure your hyperlinks are prone to open in the new tab.

If your hyperlinks are opening in the same tab of your website, your readers will feel irritated as they would have to hit a “back” button to continue again on your site or especially has to do a right-click to open that link separately manually. It might happen that users out in irritation, won’t make efforts to continue on your website.

To make your hyperlinks open in a new tab:

You just simply have to add, Target = “_blank” in your HTML.

By doing this simple thing, you will get great traction and engagement from your end-users.

2. Don’t keep on adding too many outbound links

This is a general rule of life, you cannot have too many good things. Everything beyond the limit is just detrimental. Water is good for the body but drinking 4 gallons of water thinking it will be healthy, you know this isn’t how things work.

Similarly, you can’t put plenty of external links on your site. While posting plenty of links, you will experience two bad things - first, you will drive away your potential users to other sites, and second, search engines will look at you like a website that’s circulating spammy links to manipulate the search results.

Though there is no clear understanding of the fact that how much should be quantity of external links. The key is to keep only the links that could help and support your users' reading time. 

Make sure your links are:

• • Sparsely located within the content and doesn’t look clustered
  • The sentence or fragment of the content you are planning to hyperlink is relevant to the external link website and tells exactly what people will get ahead of by clicking on that link.
  • If you assertively want people to open those links, you can use catchphrases like “this might help you” around or for hyperlink --- this will more likely to make people click at it.

3.  Don’t force links in your content

External link building should be organic rather than forced. When you do your writing part right, there will be ample opportunity to insert the relevant links.

In 2016, Google imposed penalties on websites that contained unnatural or irrelevant external links. Such offending websites webmasters were asked to either remove the irrelevant links or put no-follow tags on such links.

Firstly write the entire copy on the subject or topic you want to, in parity with your business offerings. There, if you feel the need to expand user experience, look for the content fragments and link them towards the websites that have better and detailed information to that fragment or essence of the topic. If you feel your content needs powerful backup sources to support your writing statements, there you can use links.

4. Don’t fall for the too-much mutual backlinking game

Too many mutual backlinks can be suspicious for the search engines. Earlier, many websites were putting this practice of supporting mutual backlinks in great quantity to empower each other’s websites and increase their search engine rankings.

Ever since Google’s Panda update rolled out, it broke down the network of mutual backlinking promoting websites to prevent fake authority and fake rankings. Though businesses are still putting the use of this practice if Google spots down too much of mutual backlinks, there will be negative consequences to such intended actions.

Even if you want to have mutual backlinks, make sure they are created naturally and not after careful planning to fool the search engines. Misuse of this practice will not only make you lose your ranking but would also degrade your brand image.

5. Select an anchor text that’s descriptive 

Anchor text is a fragment of content that you select to put a hyperlink on - of high-authority third-party websites. Make sure to select an anchor text for the external link that is descriptive and sums up what to expect in another page.

You can choose your target keywords or other clear words that describe the third-party page well-off. Doing this practice will improve your website’s usability for both search engines and the target audience.

6. Be strict with the type of third-party websites you are planning to link websites

Just like linking to authoritative and relevant websites can increase your brand value, similarly, if you will opt for the poor resources fed and low-quality websites, blogs, comments, subreddits, and forums for linking, you will erode your business image.

Pro tip - Do not automatically allow the links in your comments section. If you do not want to choke your website with spammers, trollers and self-promoting webmasters, make sure to manually monitor whatever is posted in the comments section - to maintain the integrity of your content and the image. Timely use an outbound link checker to ensure that all your links are latest, resourceful, and aren’t the broken ones.

7. Get the help of Google’s related link tool to find the external linking websites

If you are facing a hard time in determining the types of external links or sites for your website, you can take help of Google’s related link tool. The tool helps you find links to websites that are similar to your website type.

Inside the tool’s search bar, enter - “related: (your website name)”. Upon entering this query, you will have a handful of website links that Google thinks are similar to your website type.