Outbound links on your website
June 4th, 2008 by Dan Roberts Is there any value in having outbound links on your website or are you in fact damaging the value of your website in search engine rankings?
I have been on a plane today flying from Queenstown to Auckland on my way to a Backpacking Queensland committee meeting in Bundaberg to take up a newly appointed role. Firstly, New Zealand is a stunning place - lots of fresh snow on the Southern Alps and Mt Cook looking as majestic as ever in the clear blue sky. Nonethless, I am pontification; and that is not the purpose of this post.
In between staring out of the window I was reading an article about SEO and came across this interesting statement:
Don’t put too many links to other sites (on your site). Links out lower your pages’ importance
Somehow this does not quite sit right with me and I thought I would throw it out for some comment (Andrew?).
I have written about the importance of links before and my understanding is that a link to your site from another site (or vice versa) is a vote of confidence for that other site. I believe Google looks at the content of a web page and tries to ascertain the relevancy of that content for your particular subject. Links from similar pages help indicate to search engines that users think this page to be relevant.
Now inbound links are obviously strongest - a link to your page from a page of similar content will increase the value of your site and its position in search results. An important point is that links from pages of dissimilar content will not be regarded with much value - if at all, therefore getting a link on someones link page is pretty much useless.
Second reciprocal links are some value, but nowhere near as high as one-way links. Google and other search engines deprecate the value of reciprocal links as generally they go against the whole idea of links being a vote of relevancy for the content on the web page. When it became obvious of the importance of links in search engines tere was a mad rush to get links - the “you link to me and I will link to you” mentality. It didn’t take long for Google to work out that this wasn’t the idea and to quickly devalue reciprocal links.
So what of outbound links? Well I believe that the backbone of the search engine algorithm is the concept of linking and that if having outgoing links lowered the value of your site the whole search engine rankings system would be undermined as everyone would stop linking.
Instead well used outbound links that provide your users with links to other web pages of complementary content are adding to your website as a resource and increasing your search engine value as your page is recognised as being more relevant for your particular area.
June 9th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
The debate around ‘PR leak from outbound links’ has been going on for some time.
If interested do a search with keywords like - outbound links pr leak - or - outbound links google.
However I’m sure that there will be just as many theories, indepth testing, discussions and differing conclusions as with all other aspects of SEO.
To keep it safe in terms of SEO I would limit outbound links per page to between 10-20, accompany each link with descriptive text and not use the exact same keyword are you are trying to get ranked for as the link text.
On the other hand, in terms of the user - do what will work best for them - sticking to common usability practices - a natural linking structure will emerge.
Most of the time the SEO and usability aspects are mutually inclusive e.g. in the case of having heaps of outbound link for a page - it would be better for both to categories these and spread them over a number of smaller pages.
Cheers.