Do Outbound Links Stow Search Engine Power?

This is a theory that I keep coming back to time and time again - it looks to me as though having an outbound link on your page that contains the desired keyword has a positive impact.

Now, I do not know if this applies to only when the link points to pages on your own site or any outbound links, but time and time again I see before me the evidence that this might just be the case.

Last night I was comparing 2 of my own websites. The first, with Page Rank 3 and ample of SEO work against the second, Page Rank 0 and ignored. They are both sites, feeding from the same cottages database, listing the same cottages in the same towns etc. The differences to the title and description tags are tiny, and anyway, I doubt these elements hold much weight. Not enough that rent [town name] against [town name] rent is going to explain the differences I am seeing.

But the fact of the matter is that the lower page rank web site gets 4 times the traffic of the other website. When we are submitting articles for the higher ranking website, its visitors increases. But, as soon as we stop, it drops back to the 25% mark.

Each page is ever so slightly different with a small thesaurus applied to the text, but not that much different. In essence, the websites are the same.

So why does the newer, lower Page Rank, totally ignored site get 4 times the traffic of the site that I have lavished lots of hours on trying to increase its traffic.

At this point I looked at the traffic stats only to see where visitors were finding the sites. The lower traffic web site had a few searches for odd terms. The search engines obviously picking up cottage names and descriptions from deep within the site. So they are trawling the site well (some inner pages have Page Ranks of 2).

For the poorer cousin with ample of visitors, the main search results were [town name] rent and so on. The sort of searches that are more abundant, produce more traffic and are more competitive.

So, although there is a lack of search engine optimisation and Page Ranking, it is doing better in the search results. For this reason I started to look at the town pages of both website to see where and how often the word rent was mentioned and also the same for the particular town.

Basically, looking at the town name, the sites were near enough the same. OK, one web site has "rent" before the town name and the other after it, but the search engine results showed both versions anyway - if anything, more favoured the way they were shown in the lower ranking website.

There was merely one instance of the words rent and the town name on the higher traffic site that the lower traffic web site did not use. And that was in the breadcrumbs!

The higher traffic website offers links to the higher level pages and the present page through the breadcrumbs, the lower visitors site merely relied on the main navigation to cover it.

So, there is an obvious change and an equally obvious conclusion. The difference in traffic is because one web site has an outbound link containing the search terms. Why would this be? That is for another time?

Article Source: http://gamblingarticlessite.com

Written by Keith Lunt, provider of website design Southport services. If you want to know more about search engines, pick up our free ebook from our marketing blog.

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