How Many External Websites Do You Link to In Your Blog?

As I was linking to Desi Baba in my previous blog post, I looked back at his blog again, and I realize he really did what he preached to me; his external links are almost next to zero. He has been telling me about being careful with links, because it gives your readers a door to exit your website instantly. When I looked back, my main blog itself has got many “doors” to link out my readers… I have my “helpful links” for my readers if they are useful to them.

Is External Links Good or Bad?
External links are good for your readers! But when it comes to your own website, you might think your readers might not come back again. While Desi Baba has been advising me, I have been reducing my links out. However, I couldn’t resist letting my readers see the good stuff out there… Just like I have been linking his blog quite often too.

So my conclusion is this: Continue to link to sites that are useful. Be really selective in your links as it affects three ways:

1. It affects your readers’ concentration in reading the wrong things.
2. It affects your blog’s linking out impression.
3. It affects google bot’s impression of who you really are for linking to irrelevant sites.

You got to strike a balance in your post’s external links too. Imagine if you took the effort to link in every word that you wrote in a single post…

1. It makes your post a little unreadable,
2. it gives an impression of a really messy content..
3. and your readers will be confused where to focus on since there are so many links there to look at!

Managing your external links in your blog

1. Probably you might want your readers to read that particular link more than anything else… Just link that and nothing else!
2. Don’t link anybody if you are just writing it on your own without anybody in mind… Don’t have to link on purpose…
3. Try to maintain the number of links to a maximum of 5. (Any number which is comfortable to you.)

Linking for money

• Linking to external sites for money seems to be illegal in Google arena. However, I don’t see any real action from Google being taken against all the middleman websites managing the text-linking activities between websites.
• In fact, it seems to be a good idea to link for money. While linking for money is possibly good for content-based websites, it may sometimes give the readers a bad impression of your site for linking not for the good purpose.
• To counter this problem, it is good to have a separation between the sponsored links and the natural links. Sponsored links should be specified out while natural links can just float anywhere in the website.
• Any reader should understand that the website authors still need to survive in this beautiful planet called earth, hence having some sponsorship is good for both the websites and their readers as the readers can continue to learn while the websites can continue to contribute… A true win-win situation…

Conclusion
If a site is giving good contents, it doesn’t matter whether the site is big or small, high or low pagerank, famous or not, so long as the website can help your readers it is a good site! Link it to give them some credits about it. Remember, this world is round… What you give to someone else is what you are going to receive from another person eventually…