Disclaimer:
The opinions blogged herein represently only those of Rick E. Bruner and do not reflect those of his employer, persons or companies mentioned herein, or anyone else.
Matt Welch called my attention to something Henry Copeland wrote about the counter-intuitive power that featuring outbound links on you site has for driving traffic to your site. Quoting Henry:
Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit did more than 100,000 page views yesterday....
Instapundit illustrates a perverse law of web traffic. We all know about Metcalfe's law, which states that the usefulness of a network equals the square of its user count. Here's the Copeland corollary: site traffic multiplies in proportion to outbound links. (9/14/02 Revised to "site traffic multiplies in proportion to outbound links to other bloggers' posts"... see comments for more ideas.)
Of course quality, focus, information-density and presentation are essential. But all else being equal, a site that links religiously will attract orders-of-magnitude more traffic than a site that ignores the rest of the web.
This law upsets traditional publishers, who are born and bred to grab eyeballs and hold 'em. Glenn made nearly 100 links yesterday -- some narcissistic publishers haven't made that many in five years online.
I agree completely. So much so, in fact, that before Henry gets credit for coming up with this corallary, I'd like to point out that I made the same observation in the 1998 edition of my book Net Results. Quoting:
At play on the Web is the phenomenon of "Metcalfe's Law": The value of a network to its users is equal to the number of users squared. That is, networks grow exponentially more valuable as they gain more users (and nodes, routers and other communication points). As Bob Metcalfe, inventor of the Ethernet protocol, [put it], "If you had the only telephone in the world, who would you call?"
According to this principle, every Web site is expected to play some role as a hub. It's the same way the intersections of strands of a spider's web lead in multiple directions, and how roads into a city generally exit in at least one other direction. Sites without links are like loose strands on a web, leaving visitors stranded like dead flies....
Surprisingly, many Web marketers miss this point. A quick straw poll of well-known consumer brand sites, such as Coca-Cola, Pampers, Saturn, Nike, Staples and others, reveals that they have almost no links to other sites on the Web. [True now as when written in 1998.]
Presumably, those marketers fear that by providing "exit" links they will "lose" visitors to other sites. That view is naïve. If visitors like your content enough, they'll stay a while and maybe even come back. But the Web is bigger than just your site, so eventually they're going to leave, with or without your help.
Almost without exception, sites increase their value to users by linking to recommended content elsewhere on the Web. It's just as Metcalfe's Law describes. A site with no links is only as valuable as its original content, which, in the case of products such as carbonated beverages or soap, could get old quick. [Have you been to Coke's site lately? Could it suck more?]
Links to other sites introduce the dimension of gateway content, opening up users to the vast resources of the Web without much extra effort on the referring site's part. Even after a user has seen everything there is to see at a marketing site, it may still be worth bookmarking if the links make it a small portal to a unique collection of new material.
However, sites need not take Metcalfe's Law literally by amassing as many links as possible. For most sites, the quality of links is more important that the sheer quantity. That said, it's no surprise that search engines and directories, the largest aggregators of links, are among the most valuable web networks in terms of advertising revenue.
Look at the other sites that feature abundant links to external resources. Netscape, CNET, The New York Times [more so back in 1998], CNN, Wired and other web titans litter their content with links to other sites, and none of them seems to be losing traffic as a result.
Another point on all this is that Google loves blogs! This is something not many in the SEO community have been talking about much yet, but linking frequently to other sites and posting fresh content frequently (both behaviors that all but define weblogs) will signficantly improve your ranking in search listings. But that's a whole other story.
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