Make Sure Your Blog Posts Don’t Have Too Many Links!

Written by Nick Stamoulis

How many links do you have in your blog posts? When people write content for their websites, they often feel the need to include links to relevant sources. In some cases, this is the right thing to do. For example, if you list a statistic or leave a quote from a medical study, you should give readers the link and site the source. Not linking to the source in cases such as these is actually considered a form of plagiarism. If this happens once in a while on your blog, it shouldn’t be a problem. This kind of linking is a positive thing and can even build up your credibility.

However, it is all too easy to go overboard when it comes to linking in posts. Have you seen posts with links scattered throughout? The post author may have thought it was necessary. However, from an SEO standpoint, it can kill whatever momentum you’ve build up with all your hard work. Here are a few reasons why you should steer clear of over-linking:

internet 3d conceptAudience Effectiveness

While dropping a link or two in a post every once in a while can actually give you credibility in your audience’s eyes, overdoing can have the opposite effect. Readers often find excessively linking annoying and cumbersome and they may begin to question whether your posts are worth the effort to read. In other words, too many links diminishes your content’s effectiveness to the audience. When writing, strive to avoid links and if you can’t avoid it, do so sparingly. Your audience will thank you!

Not Truly Evergreen

One of the great things about writing evergreen content is that you can write it and forget about it and it will stay relevant for a long time. When you add links, this is no longer the case. If a link within your post becomes outdates, it decreases the likelihood that the article will stay relevant. Content that is truly evergreen will never go out of style. Outdated links automatically date the content in your own posts.

More to Manage

If you do decide to put links in your posts, you need to constantly monitor them. Site owners constantly tweak the content on their sites. If you place a link in your site and then the owner deletes the post or changes the URL, it will no longer become a relevant link. Once your site has a broken link on it, Google may give you a penalty. Putting links on your sites creates more work for yourself because you will constantly need to test these links to make sure they are still valid. Otherwise you could be setting yourself up for failure. It’s much better to avoid getting a penalty from Google than to try to get the penalty reversed once you do have one.

Though it can be hard to avoid in some cases, avoid adding links to your posts. It makes your content much more relevant in the eyes of your audience and it also creates much less work for yourself over the long term.

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