A Tale Of Linking and Overlinking

Let us be brutally honest, we have all come across them. And you cannot exactly shake them off either; these ads are just ominously floating around every kind of page, every kind of niche and every kind of site. Some newcomers often ask me the value of having a proper link embedded in their content. It can be images, it can be paragraphs and it can even cited material right? The greenhorns have trouble understanding the marketability and of having a page overflowing with links and this is partially why I write this with a mix of exasperation.

Overlinking

Yep I just made up that word and I believe it is very legitimiate when I read some articles across the web and see some of the paragraphs in articles oozing more in blue underlines than in actual content. The links are content too of course (technically) but really to me it just seems like a lot of clogging being done on the article. Stuffing things into the article for the sake of stuffing them, but that’s just one issue right? Cognitively, you do not like the look of a page which seems to have that many links on it. It’s unreasonable sure, but it’s a part of the appeal and as part of the marketing stratagem it is pretty silly if you go against your basic consumer appeal.

If that is not strong enough reason for you then let me bring back another principle of good content making; the authenticity and originality of your content. Granted that truly original content is not that easy to write but the degree to which you borrow content by linking other sites and articles is also something which you need to control. Imagine again if your reader starts getting the inkling that most of the content drafted on the page is not actually yours. It discredits your line of work and your credibility in a manner. So from a business perspective you become handicapped right there, because your prospective client is not assured of your repertoire and thus he is not assured of what he buying from you.

If that is not a good enough reason for you then let me provide you with another one: Google. It’s common knowledge that Google is become smarter and more sophisticated in judging the content of the sites, hence the method through which it populates its search ranks. The controversy surrounding the NoFollow link was also because of ranking: thinking that Google did not reward it. This was quite untrue, because Google discredited an overflow of NoFollow links on to your website. An influx of such links meant that most sites considered your content to be unreliable and this is exactly the semantic Google assigns to your website if it finds too many links upon your page. Here I refer to the density of the content and the links in question of course. Partly Google does this because of suspect of spamming but even if the content is seemingly relevant then even Google decreases its value because of the impact it creates upon the reader.

The usage of sparse linking is what is referred to as quality linking by SEtalks which is a useful clue to follow if you are looking to know why a less quantity of links is good to have if you’re looking to follow through on a successful digital marketing campaign.