Myth: external links always tank your LinkedIn reach

Myth: external links always tank your LinkedIn reach

The question: does putting a link in the post body actually suppress distribution, or did we inherit a rule of thumb that no longer holds?

The popular advice says strip every link to the first comment. It traces back to creator screenshots circa 2021-2022, not a controlled test. More recent practitioner studies (Richard van der Blom's annual algorithm report, n in the hundreds of thousands of posts, observational not experimental) find the penalty is real but conditional, not absolute.

Three findings worth holding:
— The drag is largest on link-only posts with thin commentary; rich text with one contextual link sees a far smaller gap.
— 'First comment' link-dropping recovers some, not all, of the loss, and adds friction for the reader.
— Posts where the audience genuinely wanted the resource can outperform link-free posts on saves and profile visits.

Caveats: this is correlational (we can't see the ranking model), platform-wide averages hide segment variance, and behavior shifts quarterly. Treat as directional.

Bottom line: don't ban links — ban context-free links. A wanted resource beats a clean feed metric.