What is the Purpose?

[GFPC]

Why do many webmasters link to Google, Dmoz, Wiki and other various sites in their footer?

This may be a common question that has been answered and I have a general idea of the reason but figured I would ask anyways to get peoples take on it. Is it actually useful?

[leporello]

As spposedly linking out to trusted resources is beneficial for SEO and site trust. complete joke how much people do it though.

[Laurence]

I thought this was going to be a deep philosophical thread about the meaning of life and balling hard. I was anxious to explain it all to everyone but never mind now!

[pokeraussie]

IMO that is a huge noob mistake (with relation to linking to sites like DMOZ/Google/Yahoo/etc). I think you'd be far better off linking to topical authority sites in your niche that aren't direct competitors.

[GFPC]

I just cannot see how linking to Google or Yahoo would give any boost to your site, and your certainly not helping your visitors, and I suspect your leaking out PR juice (not that PR matters). I guess I sort of feel if there is no use for it - why do it.

I agree with pokeraussie on his take actually. I also felt its not natural for sites to just never link out at all. I often see that as well where they get buckets of incoming and never ever have any outgoing.

Interesting though as i mainly see this within the gambling niche and no where else (just never saw it).

[pokeraussie]

I wouldn't say PR doesn't matter. As much as G would like to say it doesn't it still does to a certain extent. Show me an extremely competitive term that is ranking on google.com that doesn't have a high PR. Sure you can outrank lower PR pages over higher PR pages, but in markets where pages are mostly ranking based on authority and not PR to that specific page. So in other words no one is really targeting the keyword so its not difficult to rank even with a lowish PR.

But back to the topic of this thread. Just like PR is gained mostly from external links and not internal links, I think trust or trustrank or whatever you want to call it works much in the same way. What other people are saying about you is going to carry a lot more weight then what you are saying about others.

IMO of course.

[Mr-AJ]

Linking to authorities is generally a good thing but the way most webmasters do it just makes no sense. Linking to Google on a poker site doesn't make that much sense. Linking to Google from an SEO site is a different story. I think the mistake is linking to "any" authority without thinking about it like linking to poker article at wikipedia etc.

[leporello]

It's a long held belif that linking out to authority sites and trusted resources from pages on your site adds to your "trust rank" in terms of how your site behaves.

I'd hardly call it a noob mistake seeing as a large number of the biggest ballas (many on this forum) all do it on close to 100% of their sites. Dmoz/Yahoo/Google aren't competitors, nor is Wiki, government sites, edu sites, problem gambling sites etc. So people feel safe doing that. However, it's completely overdone and in part it's what creates ridic strong sites such as Wiki/Wiz of Odds, albeit in some cases those sites deserve to be there!

[pokeraussie]

It's a long held belif that linking out to authority sites and trusted resources from pages on your site adds to your "trust rank" in terms of how your site behaves.

I'd hardly call it a noob mistake seeing as a large number of the biggest ballas (many on this forum) all do it on close to 100% of their sites. Dmoz/Yahoo/Google aren't competitors, nor is Wiki, government sites, edu sites, problem gambling sites etc. So people feel safe doing that. However, it's completely overdone and in part it's what creates ridic strong sites such as Wiki/Wiz of Odds, albeit in some cases those sites deserve to be there!

The strategy makes sense. What doesn't is linking to sites like DMOZ/Google when you can accomplish the same thing and provide a better user experience linking to other sites.

[Notspot]

I'm sure this topic came up recently somewhere on here, but I'll repeat what I said then. Most of the ppl you see linking to those sites in their footer put them up a long time ago when there was alot of talk about how effective it could be (07-08). It probably has no SEO value at all anymore but why remove the links? What with google having hissy fits over adding / removing footers and sitewides I wouldn't remove anything on an old successful site unless I had a very good reason to.