Link Love Vs Lack Love

B.Durant said:

“I’d be interested in knowing why you are so strict when it comes to linking to other websites. I understand quality control but listening to the interview it was almost as if you’d rather not see any links at all but being that this is the world wide web you hold your nose and swallow it down.”

You’ve heard the old saying that you are judged by the friends you keep, right? Websites are judged by the friends they link.

If we link to bad friends (known as “bad link neighborhoods”), we’ll be judged as being just as bad as those sites having just endorsed them via an outbound link.

In addition, we value providing our users a POSITIVE USER EXPERIENCE. Links to sites that deliver a negative user experience reflect poorly on us and everyone connected with the EzineArticles system. Ideal EzineArticles expert authors also want to associate themselves with others of the same respect; therefore to continue to earn their respect, we must reject members who link to sites that break user trust.

Don’t get me wrong; we love links to other sites and this is a CRITICAL component to the value proposition that EzineArticles makes to its’ members! The only way we can reach our goal of being our members highest non-search engine referrer of traffic is by outbound links from the Resource Box of every article we host. Last month, over 3.62 MILLION outbound visitors left EzineArticles to surf the sites of our members.

You’d be floored if I showed you how many thousands of our members have submitted great articles that we had to reject because the links in their articles went to “UNDER CONSTRUCTION” websites or their articles talked about one subject and then they linked to something absolutely completely and utterly having nothing to do with their expertise or what they just shared in the article (we view this as user-deception (regardless as to if it was on purpose or not)).

Get this: Right now we have 951 articles soft-rejected because the link in their resource box goes to a dead/invalid website. Dead links provide a poor user experience obviously.

The stakes are huge and thus, the strictness will continue to rise as it has since day one. This ensures value for those who continue to get their articles accepted every day without any problems.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on December 10, 2008 at 6:27