hi,

i read that having to many external links will have a negative effective on your site so my question is i have alot of links like say in my page of where to get your painting supplies so instead of having these as text links i thought perhaps i have an image link instead so the robots can't tell it is an external link and it doesn't affet my site negatively. would that work?

hi,

i read that having to many external links will have a negative effective on your site

Maybe but there is a lot more that comes into play.

so my question is i have alot of links like say in my page of where to get your painting supplies so instead of having these as text links i thought perhaps i have an image link instead so the robots can't tell it is an external link and it doesn't affet my site negatively. would that work?
Search engines can see links in images too, unless you mean Flash content. You may want to add "noindex" and/or "nofollow" meta data if this is an issue.

Unless you are linking to bad sites or your site is nothing but links you may be better off leaving things as they are.

Why do you think external links are bad? Any reason?

Why do you think external links are bad? Any reason?

i read that in websitepublisher.net something about off page optimization. it is apparently a well respected site?it kind of makes sense if you have no incoming links and have many external links going out it may affect your page rank.

i've got a very simple site with no affiliate programs at the moment url myminiaturepainting.com. in some of my articles i have lists of games company people can buy from. after reading the seo guide i started worrying about how many external links i have on a page in cluding mat=y be cutting back only links page since none of them have reciprocal links to me. i only put the links there cos i thought it might be handy for my readers but if it's going to hurt my site i would rather just leave them all out and have just the few i have links to or plan to affiliate with. am i paniciking too much then. if possible maybe you can look at my links page and tell me what you think. thank you

Why do you think external links are bad? Any reason?

Maybe our gentle poster read that having TOO MANY outbound links on 1 page is bad?

Regardless, search engines can still see external links whether it is in text or images. Setting up robots.txt files to block following those links would be a good solution - IF you must have those links.

You can build the external links with JavaScript so that they are ignored by the search crawlers.

You can use the "no follow" tag. Please view the example below.

<a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">Example.com</a>

You can build the external links with JavaScript so that they are ignored by the search crawlers.

is it easy to build javascript and do you have the code please. if it's not too hard i would like to learn.thank you

also thank you comcorp for your no follow code.

Yah sure, it would look something like this

<a href="#"
onclick="window.open('http://www.site.com','win','width=600,height=400');">Link Text Here</a>

thank you for the code

That js code will work, but it might come back to haunt you. What you are indicating to the user -- and 'bots -- is that the link is going to take them to an (nonexistent) anchor, when they are actually going to be taken to a new site. It's a bit of misdirection that can -- not necessarily will -- hurt.

As Marcia tried to imply with her question above, external links aren't in themselves bad. Unless your external links are to 'bad neighborhoods' or the pattern makes the site appear to be a 'thin affiliate', external links to resources your users can use should not be a problem.

Think like an SE for a moment: What is more promising, a new site with no or very few incoming links and no external links that turns out to be an Internet dead end, or a new site with links to good resources?

Don't worry about manipulating PR, concentrate on building a solid site. PR will come with a bit of link building and time.

hi jimbeetle,


i have decided not to use any no follow or robot.txt.or javascript after much confusion. the confusion arose because i read somewhere that too many external links are not good and finally someone on another forum explained it very well to me that if my links are to relevant pages then i shouldn't robot txt or no follow because people might link to my link pages because i have compiled a list of resources handy for my readers and since my links were put up there for that reason i shouldn't worry too much as long as i leave it around 20-30 links each page. this makes very much sense to me.i think i just panicked too much after reading the seo guide and especially when other people were telling me to no follow and robot.txt etc without understanding what i wanted to know, thanks for your input. :)