Linking - Re-designing, Outbound Links Can Affect Your Rankings
Today’s final track on linking included some of the brightest brains we know today, Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land, Nathan Buggia from MSN, Matt Cutts from Google, Pryank Garg from Yahoo!, Peter Linsley from ASK, Todd Malicoat & Rae Hoffman representing the SEM’s.
There were several discussions about how to preserve your link juice when you move a domain, re-design etc., The simple solution as was mentioned is to make sure your 301 redirects are in place. Also, if you have a large site, you should move and re-direct in small chunks to determine the loss, or stability of your link equity.
Regarding outbound links, the panels comments somewhat puzzled me, that outbound links can affect your rankings? Say what? Yes, that’s what I heard, but here is the qualifier. If you link out to lots & lots of “bad neighborhood” sites, they pretty much said this can affect your link equity. Obviously this is not happening all the time, however I did not know this. So the point is just be careful right? Don’t start giving people your hard earned link juice if they are not worthy, especially if you are doing this thinking it will drive you traffic, or PR. It won’t help your PR, it can hurt it (if you abuse it), you may get traffic, but the wrong traffic. Nuff said!
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Awesome website! Information is very helpful and you two are loads of fun, keep it up……looking forward to learning more about search engines, linking, and getting traffic results.