Today's question comes from India.
Nayanseth wants to know, "I have a blog and I post original articles, but I also like to link to the original website.
So I link the website in a word in the first paragraph.
Is this the right way, or should I give a link separately at the bottom?"
Great question. So I'm assuming you're a white hat blogger, you're writing original content, you're linking to white hat stuff.
So we're going to answer it like everybody's well-behaved, not like you're spamming or RSS auto-blogging oranything like that.
The answer is, either way can work.
So whatever way you choose to do will work fine for Google's ranking because the link, whether it's at the bottom of the article, or whether it's
in that first paragraph, it still flows page rank either way.
And so credit will flow to the website that you're referring to.
I'll just say, for my personal preference, I really appreciate when there is a link somewhere relatively close to the top of the article because I really want to know, when someone's talking
about it, hey, go ahead and show me where I can read the original source, or let me look up more information.
There are a lot of blogs that will give one tiny little link all the way at the bottom of a big, long story.
And by that time, it just doesn't seem like it's quite as useful.
But that's just a personal preference.
That's not ranking advice, as far as it goes.
The only other thing I hate--this is, again, just personal-- is, whenever you've got a regular news report, whether it's in a mainstream newspaper, "New York Times," AP, whatever, and they say, blah, blah, blah, said on a popular webmaster blog that blah, blah, blah-- and they don't link to the source. I mean, come on, link to your sources.
Whether you're a journalist, whether you're a blogger, let people go and look at the original information themselves so that they can suss out what they think about whatever it is you're
writing about.
So if you just say, oh, it was discovered on a popular forum that blah, blah, blah, then we have to go look for it, that's really annoying. Again, not ranking advice, just
asking everybody to be considerate on the web, and share credit and attribute so that people can do the research for themselves, if they want to.