Linking Out: Finding the Benefits - You Win Some and You Lose Some
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Linking out to other sites, especially competitor's sites, can be problematic. No website owner wants to risk losing paying business to other sites. Loss of visitors is especially painful if the traffic was sent to the competitor through a link out from your own site. The question is how large is that risk.
If a webmaster believes that visitor traffic will maintain loyalty to their site, then sending visitors elsewhere will do little or no harm to sales. The concern is not with the outgoing links, but with onsite conversion factors. If a site provides no good reasons to buy their products and services they offer, then sales will be weak, whether there are links to competitors or not.
A strong website offers a balance of useful information as a reason to visit and powerful reasons to buy once there. Offering that assistance to visitors develops a trust factor that will lead to more sales. If a potential customer is lost due to an outgoing link, they might not be strong long term buyers in any case. They may just as easily return to your site as quickly as they left for the competitor’s offer.
In fact, loss of customers to competitors can serve as a powerful wake up call to improve your onsite conversions of visitors to customers. Without the feedback found through escaped traffic, that systemic site problem might never have been discovered. Any perceived outflow of traffic through links to other sites can serve a very useful purpose. Use that market intelligence to improve your conversion rates.
Not all search engine optimization experts believe that Google PageRank is leaked away through outgoing links. In fact, many SEO people believe that the PageRank that flows out in one area is returned through inbound links from other websites. They argue that the level of Google PageRank, paradoxically, can only really be increased by linking out to other sites.
In that regard, creating a PageRank island with no outgoing links is harmful to a site. Linking out becomes a good thing, resulting in more inflowing than outflowing PageRank. Provided that a solid ratio of somewhat more inbound links than outgoing links is maintained, PageRank will constantly rise. The positive ratio of links will serve a site in good stead in the SERPs as well.
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