Why should anyone bother linking to other content on another website? Why send people other places when you could include internal links only? These readers should stay on my site! So, forget about linking out, and as a result, those visitors should stick around longer. Well, not so fast -- if that were true, then why would any site have external links?

This all leads up to the question of why should a blogger even bother with linking out to other pages? Well, there are plenty of reasons, and some of you might be shocked to learn that outbound links can actually help your blog to grow in more ways than one. It might take time, but here are a few reasons why linking to other quality content is a great idea.

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Note: This article does NOT contain one of the letters for the Performancing Treasure hunt

The day 1 clue was "sleazy link-whoring tactics"

Without giving away the answer to the clue, I can tell you that the number one result for that search *now* is not a participating blog. However, because he posted the clue as the title to one of his posts, we see the power of keyword stuffing...and that the thin content penalty does not apply to low-volume searches.

The interesting thing is that the number one result *does not* have the keyphrase sleazy link-whoring tactics in the title tag. The title tag, as of this moment, is "[Geeks are Sexy] technology news"

Nor does the number one result have the keyphrase in the URL.

Some more interesting results:

This search on Google yields approximately 29 results when, the day before we ran the contest, it yielded exactly ZERO results.

Some of the results in the Google SERPS are based purely on Anchor text. Why else would YouTube and Ezinearticles show up for such a search? After all, they have absolutely no on-page relevance to sleazy link whoring tactics. But yet they got linked to with that anchor text.

By the way Kiltak, you're going down. This post is going number one in 48 hours.