Before we start today’s post, let me define the SEO term: Webmaster Outreach.  When a webmaster, or an owner of a business contacts another person, usually via email, but sometimes by phone or in person, for the sole purpose of asking for a link on that person’s website, we call that webmaster outreach. They may be asking for the link for their own site, their client’s site, or for some unknown client as of yet. Often, a monetary offer accompanies this webmaster outreach.

If you’ve built your site as a destination portal in the hopes of monetizing it through advertising, this is great! Someone wants your site.

If you’ve built your site to sell your products or services, this may not be a good idea.

Here’s the thing. When you place outgoing links on your site, you pass the “Google juice” along to someone else. This may not be great for your personal rankings. But more importantly, you take the chance of sending away a potential customer. My advice – just stay away from it. It’s not worth it.

Back to those sites that have been built for advertising – here are some best practices to make your links appear as natural as possible.

  • Only place links that are relevant to your website’s content. You don’t want to place a link for teeth whitening on your site about internet marketing, for example.
  • Place the link in content if possible. Write a brief article or paragraph to surround the link.
  • Don’t label the link in a way that indicates that it may be an advertisement. Google expects you to place a no follow designation on links that are paid advertisements.
  • Limit the number of links that you allow on each page.

Check out this example of a site that placed a link for a friend of mine who practiced a little webmaster outreach. I’m happy to share this site with you because the publisher was nice enough to place my friend’s link free of charge.

He may not have placed the links in content – and there are quite a few of them. But they are VERY on topic. I suppose that if I were Google, looking at this page, I might be suspicious about these being paid links, but with no way of knowing, would be forced to accept them as natural links.

Coming soon:
Webmaster Outreach – How to Get Publishers to Place Your Link on Their Site

Thanks for reading.

David McBee

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