Should I add external links in my blog – Benefits and cons explained

In this SEO blog, I will discuss if you should use external links in your articles or not. This article is going to be a little bit longer, but I recommend you not to skip any point as this is my personal experience which I am going to share. I can assure you that you will be benefited from this.

So this article will include the following points:

    • Should I add external links to my article?
    • If yes then how many external links I should insert in a single article
    • Impact of external links on my SEO score
    • I should use no-follow or do-follow for the links in my article
    • Benefits of adding external links in my article or blog
    • Cons of external links in my blog
    • Pro tips

Like my every blog I will add some pro tips at the end of the blog. I hope these tips will be beneficial to you.

During this whole blog keep this in your head: “Do not focus on building great SEO too much. Your first priority should be always user experience. So always provide good content for your visitors, not for search engines. If you provide good content search engines will provide you huge traffic.

Should I add external links to my article or blog?

This question is absolutely incomplete question. Because if you ask this question you should include “where” and “what type of link or which link” with the question.

If you are writing a blog that needs some explanation of something or you want to add some statistics but you don’t want to write those in your article, in that case, you probably be glad to add some external reference link. There can be multiple reasons for that. Here are a few of those:

  1. The explanation or statistics does not fall in your blog niche.
  2. There is something that might be too long to add to your article. Thus you want to add the reference link.
  3. There may be something to add in your article for some specific visitors but not for everyone. So it will not be suitable to force everyone to read that.
    (For example, if I want to tell my readers why we should choose a niche for our blog then I would like to let them know what is a niche. But there may be a lot of people who already have some knowledge of this. So in this case, I would just add a reference link that will discuss something about the niche. So, only interested people can click on that). This will also increase the good user experience.
  4. If you have added some information that is not owned by you. Or imagine that, you have added something in your article, but you got that from some other source. So in these types of cases, it will be always nicer to give the source website some credit by giving a reference link to the source website. (Don’t worry about this that it may damage your website’s SEO score. If the link is not spammy you can definitely add the external link in your article to give some credit.) I will discuss if it will be harmful or not to add external links in your article in this blog.
  5. If you add an image in your article but the image is not owned by you. Then it will be better to add the source link of that image.
  6. If you get a sponsored post, then definitely you can add an external link but try to mention that this is a sponsored post. (Tip: Before accepting any sponsored post, try to find out if the link is authentic or not. Do not accept sponsored posts to promote spammy links. It can give you short-term rewards but you are in the blogging industry to grow for the long term right.) You may read: Where to find sponsorship for your food blog to make money?
  7. If you receive any guest post from someone outside. They can demand a backlink in return. You can add the external link in that case. You may learn: What should you check before accepting guest posts?
    Before taking guest posts, always make sure that you will not add any spammy link in your articles. And do not forget to check if the content provided in the guest post is copied from somewhere else or not.

I hope now you can get an idea when and where you should add external links in your blog.

How many external links we should insert in a single article

You can’t say more is good or less is good here. It totally depends upon your content. Just remember that do not try to add a lot of external links in your article unnecessarily. For example: If your article title is: “Top 5 best hosting SEO tools for your blog”. For this article, it will be better if you provide the official link of all the top 5 SEO tools. So here you will have to insert 5 external links. So that your visitors can easily visit those sites and have a look. If you don’t put external links here your visitors might be irritated by searching each of those in Google one by one.

In some cases, you will not have to insert any external link. So the number of external links is totally based on the content. If you try to increase or decrease the number of external links in your articles, just following some suggested numbers, that will be not good for your content. Do not forcefully add or decrease external links. Just put the external links if it is necessary, otherwise don’t insert external links.

Do not feel like that: “If I add an external link I will pass link juice to someone else’s website”. It is good to add external links if it is needed. You can use no-follow link for that.

External links are harmful or not for SEO of my Blog

External links can be both harmful or beneficial.

It totally depends on that external link. If you insert a spammy external link in your article, that might affect your blog. It will be harmful to you. So always try to add good quality links. So what did I mean by good external links?

It does not matter if the traffic of the external link’s website is too high or too low or medium. Good quality means the content of the website is good and authentic.

In some cases affiliate, external links can generate money for you. Check how I Have Withdrawn $285.11 From CloudWays Affiliate Program

Relevant links: Make sure that you will only add some relevant links to your article. Don’t put unnecessary irrelevant links just for adding some good external links.

 

Benefits of adding external links in my article or blog

There are certain benefits that you can get by adding external links in your article. Your visitors will get these below benefits and certainly if they feel that they are benefitted it will bring benefits to you.

  1. Good user experience on your blog.
  2. Easy to get references.

There might be some other benefits like: If you add an external link of a not so popular blog, it is possible that the site owner will get your website URL as a referral source. So he or she might take a look at your website. It will help you to engage with other bloggers.

Major search engines will check the content of your external links and if they find relevant content it will be considered as good external links. It will be good for your SEO as well.

 

Cons of external links in my blog:

The cons are more dangerous and it is bigger in size than the rewards. So be careful before adding any external links in your articles. Till now I have discussed a lot of things about external links, what type of links you should insert.

So you get an idea, what type of links you should add in your articles. But if you do not follow those and add some spammy or bad external links, it can affect your blog badly. It can affect your whole website in the search engines.

  • A bad external link can affect your whole blog
  • A bad external link can give your blog a negative image to your visitors

Pro tips for adding outbound links in your articles:

External links are also known as outbound links.

  • If you are making a list of some products or tools which is a premium (not free), then you will definitely add the links of those tools or websites. In this type of scenario, go to there websites and check if they provide an affiliate program or not. If you get the affiliate link you can place those in your article and that can help you make more money.
  • If they do not provide an affiliate program then raise a request to them about giving a sponsored post to you.

If you are not well aware of these terms you may check: Tips To Earn More From Affiliate Network On Your Blog

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