Continuing our Digital Advertising Education

One of the topics in Digital Advertising that can never receive enough information and publicity if that of linking.  Everyone has a different idea of what linking actually is, and Moz.com has a number of interesting (in my opinion, some are shite) articles about it.

Webmaster Tools gives us a fair bit of information about it, but no real determinism about why some links are penalized and others are not.

There is only hypotheses about why linking is good or bad, and because I am nothing if not game for speculative debate and you are my captive audience, I’m going to espouse my educated opinions for you.

Hahahahaha…. Sucks to be you 😉

In my opinion and experience, linking is a good thing, when done in conjunction with other articles or sources that support the topic you are publishing about.

Take the article I published earlier this morning: I linked to a video that sourced a quote, from youtube, and linked from huffingtonpost.com for a supporting opinion on a point in my opinions.

Do these links help or hurt?

One theory would say that because I did not insert a rel=”nofollow” then I will lose visitors to my page and site as they will bounce out and read those articles.

Another opinion, and this is mine, says that inserting those links provides my opinion with more authority, because when one follows those links out, they will find I have accurately reported a thought, and supported it with factual evidence that was qualitatively reported.

This gives my opinion more weight, which is why academic studies supported by surveys and interviews are more authoritative than the ramblings of a homeless person on any given subject.

Now, this subject leads into an interesting issue, not, that those tech savvy individuals may have encountered.

Have you incorporated a widget on your site with a weird link in it?  SPAMMER!

For those who need assistance with terminology, widget per the Oxford English Dictionary as, “An application, or a component of an interface, that enables a user to perform a function or access a service.”

This means that those little components that you install on your sites or have your site design agency use may be carrying contagions.

Google has recently come out with a new press release on their Google Webmaster Tools saying that if your site has these things on it with little links that go to sites unrelated to its function your site will be heavily penalized.

Google wants to avoid spam in all its forms and this for them is one of the most egregious.

I would like to apologize for not giving my regular dose of sardonic humor, but if you learned something from this article, let me know and I’ll see if I can come up with more digital advertising gems for you.