Linking to other sites in your blog entries

< How to initiate a link exchange : Don't blame others if you're not getting traffic >

To expand on yesterday's blog entry, how to initiate a link exchange, I'd like to look at linking to sites within your blog entries.  The first point on the "3-step approach" applies here - that is, link to sites you want to link to.

But there's more to a link than simply posting the URL.

Link text

You don't have to link to a site with the URL, e.g. http://www.injader.com.  It's better to use a link like this: Injader - Websites are back.

Choose your link text carefully.  Don't use "click here" or "read more".  The text should be concise but descriptive.  This will benefit your readers and the site you're linking to.

Link placement and appearance

It's advisable to use underlined text for links and not to use underlined text for anything else.  That said, I use a long underline for my page headers - well, it's actually a border, but it looks like underlined text.  However, I think it's sufficiently different to my links so it doesn't cause a problem.

Also, it's not a good idea to fill a paragraph with lots of links.  It can look messy and some readers prefer to have the links laid out in a more organised fashion.

Additionally, it's better from an accessibility point of view if you either list your links at the end of a post, or keep them in roughly the same place within an article.  This is a point I remember from an accessibility course that I attended.  The reason is because some people use the Tab key to step through the links on a page, which works a lot better if you have a list of links in one place on the page.  However, it isn't something that a lot of people do.  I'll try using this concept in the next section to demonstrate how it might look.  I think it works best if you have several links to share.  Let me know what you think.

The nofollow debate

A "nofollow" link is "used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index".  An example of its usage is to prevent users from improving their search engine ranking by posting a comment and leaving their link.

Now the technical side.  In HTML, a standard link looks like this:

<a href="http://www.benbarden.com">Blogging and website tips</a>

The equivalent "nofollow" link looks like this:

<a href="http://www.benbarden.com" rel="nofollow">Blogging and website tips</a>

There is a lot of debate about this and for me it comes down to a few key points.  Proper comment moderation, i.e. "holding" comments until they are approved, can reduce the amount of spam posted on a site.  In my case, I get an email the moment anyone comments on my site.  So if it's a spammer, I just remove the comment.

I see no reason to penalise the people who legitimately comment on my site.  The nature of the Internet is that sites are linked together!  Furthermore, if I voluntarily link to a site within one of my blog entries, I see no reason why I should add "nofollow" to that link.  Doing so would make it seem like I didn't trust that site.

There is more information on this issue in the following links.  What do you think?

• Nofollow article on Wikipedia
• Nofollow revisited
• 13 Reasons Why NoFollow Tags Suck

"Link love" posts

Some blogs post "link love" entries where they do little more than post a list of links to other sites.  I am not a fan of these posts for two reasons.

Firstly, if you don't use "nofollow", there's no need to do this - people who comment will automatically get "link love" from the links they leave on your site.

Secondly, I don't think this kind of post is of much interest to most readers.  Why not make it more interesting by doing something a bit different, as in the link shown below?

• A Different And BETTER Kind of Entrecard Link Love

What are your thoughts on linking within your blog entries?  What do you do now and what might you consider doing differently in the future?

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