3 Effects Of Outbound Links

If you are one of the webmasters who do search engine optimization on your websites, you should know the effect of good quality inbound links pointing to your websites. However, a good website should always have a certain number of outbound links. These are the three major effects of having outbound links on your website:

Effect #1 Bad outbound links can hurt your search engine rankings

Having many outbound links pointing to external websites can hurt your search engine rankings, when those external websites are considered spammy by search engines. Websites you should not link to include link farms or automated linking systems that produce no value to the world wide world. However, Google mentioned it rather looks for bad outbound linking patterns,

Be assured that we’re not looking to penalize folks for a ‘bad’ link here and there. Rather, our algorithms are tuned to look for patterns of ‘egregious’ linking behavior… both on individual sites and in the aggregate.

Actively checking out the quality of an external website is recommended before pointing a link to it. However, a website with good content often has outbound links to external contents that can cross-reference its own content.

Also, Google warned that it is important to ensure the outbound links are working fine.

It’s certainly in your users’ interest that you regularly audit outgoing links on your site (especially prominent ones) to ensure that you’re not losing folks’ trust by sending them to inappropriate places or 404 pages.

Effect #2 Good outbound links can provide good user experience

Normally, no matter how comprehensive your website is on a topic, it cannot contain every little single detail. From a visitor perspective, it is always a help when a website has outbound links within its content pointing to external contents that are of complementary values.

Also, having outbound links on your website, it shows to the visitors that the content on your website can be trusted.

Effect #3 Only when you give, you will receive

Everyone understands if you don’t give you don’t get either. By offering links to other websites with similar theme to yours, you will often receive inbound links in return.

Also, offering links to other websites can often bring your own website returned visitors. Here is what Google said about this one,

Sure, it’s great to keep Google happy, but it’s usually more important (long term) to have your users be return visitors.

Conclusion

It will not stop visitors from leaving your websites by hiding or having no outbound links. If your visitors cannot find what they need on your website, they will simply go back to the search engines.

Finally, it is a good habit for all webmasters to keep up-to-date with the latest changes by visiting the Google Webmaster Central Blog on a regular basis.

Comments

4 Responses to “3 Effects Of Outbound Links”

  1. Arnie - SEO on November 29th, 2006 3:38 am

    We run a search engine optimization company and am glad to see someone pointing out the importance of OUTbound links. Every is so focused on inbound that the forget about the users (and Google).

  2. Shaan on November 29th, 2006 4:34 pm

    Hi Gordon

    Very nice blog, I have learnt a lot from it since I was assigned as a link builder for a company. Recognize the e-mail address? :)

    Keep it up man!

  3. Neeraj Lodhi on March 20th, 2007 3:14 pm

    This information is useful but i want to know how many outbound links will be helpful to any web site.

  4. Main SEO on May 8th, 2010 2:33 pm

    Linking to related topics of your website or blogs will be far more beneficial than linking to anyone you like.

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