Sometimes I think Web masters don’t see the wood for the trees.The SMO Blog is about Optimizing a website for social media and is written from a marketers point of view. A recent post points towards the The unsung power of outbound links .

To set this in context some people worry about too many links because it means that people will leave your site to visit the site you have pointed to. The other worry is that your Google Page Rank will be effected.

To counter the first argument I think if you link to useful resources consistently people will return consistently because it is worth their while. The second argument that your page rank will be affected is true to a certain extent but if your blog is useful people will link to you and this will eventually balance things out. Page rank is just an algorithm and social software is about people and making contact with them. In my book that includes linking to them.

Mark makes the same points about these issues in the unsung power of outbound links but then talks about creative linking strategies. I am very doubtful about manipulating content in order to rank higher, and don’t think that it is necessary to have ‘creative’ or false linking strategies. Simply put these strategies work the algorithm not a network of people. They do not build on providing content that is worthwhile to your visitor. I worry that people are putting energy into working the system rather than simply writing something! In other words providing something that people not a search engine wants because in the long run social software is about people.