Search Engine News from Piedmont Design

This article (The True Value of a Resource Library for Your Website) does a great job advocating for sites to create a resource library of sorts to increase their link authority, percieved trust, indexed pages and stickiness. The risk (not mentioned in the article) is that you’ll spread your trustrank too thin. If you site is sufficiently trusted to rank well for 50 pages, and you add 100, it could hurt your search engine results for all the pages. That would be counterproductive if you recieve fewer sales leads to your store because you created a resource library. That said, the library will likely attract links and increase your trustrank, imporving your ranking (and for many more keywords)

About the Resource Library:

While it’s true that a resource library, on the surface, exists to benefit site visitors, it doesn’t end there — they also provide benefits that can directly impact any business. First of all, they spread goodwill among a business’s prospect base - and its non-prospect base as well. The site is seen by visitors as offering free information about important subject matter - and that makes it a more attractive site to return to in the future when a purchase will be made or a service established.

Second, with a solid resource library, the site puts itself in a great position to organically attract important inbound links. Outside sites will notice the offerings of important and unbiased information and link to individual articles or to the resource library as a whole. This will boost traffic and rankings overall.

Third, if the articles in the section are optimized properly, they will also boost rankings for popular and competitive keyphrases, driving additional targeted traffic to the site. The traffic may enter the site at the articles, but visitors are then likely to click for further information about the site itself.