If you know me, you know my opinions about links and SEO advice from Google. If you don’t, here’s the TL;DR:
Meh, links! Meaning, all things being equal, links still remain a competitive difference maker for ranking.
Take Google’s SEO advice with several grains of salt. Google has no economic incentive to help your site rank or generate business from organic search results. They want you to buy ads!
So, when Google adds new SEO best practices for links, you should take notice, but maintain a healthy skepticism.
Most of their best practices are solid foundational recommendations about making links crawlable and understandable, including:
- Using <a> HTML elements with an href attribute.
- Using descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant anchor text.
Somewhat interesting, but really not new, are Google’s recommendations specifically relating to internal links (cross-referencing your own pages) and external links (linking to other sites).
Most smart SEOs know the power of internal links. Particularly with respect to their location and anchor text. We regularly leverage internal links and anchors for our law firm SEO clients. In fact, poorly optimized internal links are probably one of the most common technical issues I encounter when doing site crawls. These issues include:
- Javascript links.
- Broken links.
- Nondescript anchors.
- Overly-optimized anchors (i.e. keyword-stuffed).
- Excessive internal links (i.e. footer links, etc).
Fixing internal linking issues alone, is sometimes enough to see significant improvement in organic visibility.
It’s also nice to see Google reassure folks that linking to other sites isn’t something to be scared of, and in fact, “using external links can help establish trustworthiness (for example, citing your sources).”
Listen up news publishers that have developed “no external links,” policies! You’re missing the point.
That said, PageRank is still a thing. So, be mindful of how you’re using external links.
If you’re a link builder, send this updated guidance to your favorite prospects. Also, prioritize those broken link building opportunities! It’s still really effective.
And remember, take all of this with a grain of salt. Okay, in this particular instance, you can rely on just about everything Google added here.
Meh, links!
