A blogger who runs a credit card related blog recently contacted me via this site, suggesting we should add each others’ blogs to our blogrolls to increase our readerships. I responded as follows:

1. I declined to link to his blog
2. I pointed out that I don’t have a blogroll on this site anyway
3. I promised to – rather than give reasons in my response – explain this in an article

Here then, is the article in which I hope to make clear my reasoning.

Long Term Objective

In the long term, I hope to gain visitors to my blog via listings in search engines, and this requires that I be mindful both of things that will be looked on favourably and unfavourably by search engines. Strange though it may sound, it is the desire to make my blog search engine friendly that made me decline this link exchange. How can an exchange of links be a bad thing? Hopefully the paragraphs that follow will explain this.

Topical Linking

The link would be to a site the content of which is not on the same topic as my blog. Search engines use outgoing links in the profiling of a page’s content. One thing that works in any web sites favour is the keeping of content focused and on-topic. That is, the site – blog or otherwise – should have content that falls within a well defined space. In the case of this blog, that space is computing, software and the internet – or more simply, the content of this blog is computer related. Further, some search engines are no longer seeing each page individually as they have done in the past. While pages are still looked at individually, they are also seen in the context of the site as a whole. Therefore, a link that is clearly off-topic can harm the profile of a page, and this can reflect on the site as a whole.

Why no Blogroll?

In the present day, search engines are getting very smart. One thing they the leading ones do now that they didn’t a few years ago is build up a picture of what web pages actually looks like. This picture is based not only on the HTML, but also the CSS style sheet. Blogrolls tend to take the form of a list of links in a side column of every page of the blog. This sets these links outside the main textual content of the page. There is a serious danger that they will be seen as being spam links – that is, links to pages on external sites that are just parked on a page, and that do not form part of the page’s content. Search engines favour linking (for both incoming and outgoing links) in the form of on-topic editorial links – editorial links being those that naturally fit into the subject matter of the pages/sites textual content. Therefore it is possible (likely?) that a web page will suffer reduced credibility for carrying links that are perceived as spam links (even if they are on-topic for the content of the page/site).

In Summary

I hope this article serves to make my approach clear. The factors described above add up to the conclusion that in my opinion linking to a credit card blog from this one is almost certainly a bad idea in the long run.

Note in passing that although site navigation menu links are normally in the form of side column links (or in a row across the top of each page), these are not a problem as they are linking within the site rather than to external sites.

To sum up, my general approach to linking to external sites is:

• While occasionally the content of a blog article may call for an off-topic link, such links should be kept to a minimum
• Links to external sites should be editorial – that is, in the flow of a page’s text content – and should be kept on-topic