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The Hidden Risks of Adding External Links to Your Blog: How to Protect Your Content and Reputation

Writer's picture: Nina TsenovaNina Tsenova

Updated: Jan 22



Author: Barbora



Are you trying to improve your business blog but still haven't succeeded? One often overlooked but powerful strategy is using external links in your blog posts. With proper usage, external blog links can bring many valuable benefits to your blog, including:

 

-       Attracting wider audience

-       Enhancing article credibility

-       Higher SEO (Search Engine Optimization) metrics

-       Building backlinks

-       Increasing audience trust

-       Improving the reading experience

-       Gaining potential customers

 

However, every coin has two sides. And even external links have several hidden risks that might not be seen at first sight but can easily damage your company's reputation. In this article, we look at what external links are, how to avoid risks and how to protect your content and company from such risks.

 



What are external links?


External links are hyperlinks that direct readers to related content on other websites. They are often used on websites, online articles, or blogs. Through these links, readers can access additional relevant information on the topic, which can improve their understanding of the topic and increase their enjoyment of reading. External links are often embedded in a specific word or part of the sentence they relate to.

 

In general, if you prevent all possible risks and set them up correctly on your blog, they can quickly boost your company's name and reach a broader audience.

 

Potential risks of external links


Here are some main risks that you can challenge while using external links in blog posts:


1.  Loss of control over external content


When using external links on your website, the content on linked pages may change or become unavailable over time. These links are called "Broken links" and can harm your website's SEO ranking. They can also significantly impact your website traffic and readers' experience. For that, it is important to check such links in a while, either manually or you can use other possible tools like Broken Link Checker.

 

2.  Security over external content


Another risk associated with external links is the security of the external website. Over time, the website may host dangerous and inappropriate content, such as disinformation, scams, or explicit material. In addition, external websites can experience cyber-attacks, affecting users' devices while using them.

 

As a result, your blog article and the whole website can lose the reader's credibility and trust. Therefore, checking the links' credibility and trustworthiness before using them in your blog article is important. This can be done by using specific online tools like Google Safe Browsing.

 

3.  Legal issues

 

One risk can also be the responsibility of sharing author-verified or illegal content through external links. This can lead to legal action, which can be pricey for your company. If you want to use external links, looking at their privacy rules, ownership, and whether they meet all legal requirements is sound.

 

4.  SEO metrics

 

Although external links might help improve your SEO metrics, their overuse can cause the opposite. That is due to the Google metrics, which are set so that when they spot an overuse of external links to low-authority websites, they can see your website as a scam with spammy content. This can have a destructive impact on your SEO metrics and affect your website's traffic. Use the most relevant and high-quality websites for your external links to avoid this.

 

5.  Loss of regards

 

While redirecting your readers to other websites through external links, you are creating the risk of losing them. Lower time spent on your pages and low engagement can easily affect SEO metrics, making it harder to reach a wider audience. To prevent this, your article has to be very well-written and catchy. Another choice is to set external link pages to open in a new tab or window. Through that, the reader can still access the original blog article very quickly and continue reading.

 

6.  Sense of dependency on external links

 

Lastly, there is a risk of dependency on external links and following loss of article reputation. If your article is written in a way dependent on too many external links, the readers might see your article as a group of links instead of a valid source with high credibility. They say less is sometimes more. So, use just the most important external links to support your strong and well-written content based on accurate information.

 


How do I protect my blog and company?


There are many ways to prevent and avoid all of the above risks when using external links on a blog. The most crucial ones are:

 

1.  Regular check-up of external links

 

It is important to occasionally use check tools to ensure that all external links used in text exist, share relevant content, do not harm anyone, and do not share illegal or explicit content. Such tools are Broken Link Checker and Screaming Frog.

 

2.  Attribute usage

 

When coding, use appropriate attributes that control how search engines treat your links. Such attributes can then protect your SEO metrics. Between the most common attributes comes the "nofollow" attribute for untrustworthy links, the "sponsored" attribute for sponsored links, and the "ugc" attribute for links containing audience-generated content. With these simple attributes, your content would be protected from negative SEO metrics automatically dedicated by search engines.

 

3.  Watch out for SEO metrics


Regularly watch out for your SEO metrics and how they are changing. Try to pay attention to how the external links affect the SEO performance of the whole website or blog. With this approach, you can track down small nuances, thanks to which you will be able to react quickly in the event of a significant drop in ratings. Or you will be able to prevent such a drop very effectively.

 

4.  Internal links creation

 

Another great way to protect yourself from the risks of external links is to use internal links instead. If your company runs a blog, you can create links to relevant articles on your blog. It also multiplies the number of views of your articles, thereby increasing your SEO metrics. It's a safe choice because you're linking to an article that has already been published on your site, so it should meet all your preferences and general requirements.

 

Conclusion


External links can be a game changer in your company’s blog performance when used correctly. They can provide you with many benefits, such as new customers, but there are specific rules and risks that you need to consider. This article mentioned a few basic but essential tips to protect your blog posts and increase your  SEO ranking. With those, you are ready to be the star of external links!

 



 

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