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Discussion on: I'm SEO Consultant, Ask Me Anything!

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mortoray profile image
edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

Why do many SEO sites say that articles should have outgoing off-site links? Does it improve search performance somehow?

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subsr97 profile image
Subramanian 😎

AFAIK, the relevance of a page is determined by the number of inbound links from other relevant pages and outbound links to other relevant pages.
But I'm not sure. So following.

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vuild profile image
Vuild • Edited

There is no reason outbound links should impact a page's ranking in SERPs otherwise you can just add links to increase your ranking. Citations (as they were originally) are useful, but try it. Make two identical pages, one with more links.

It's changed a lot, but these are the original docs on Information Retrieval.

ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/199...
ftp://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/repor...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilltop_algo...
The principles are still there mostly.

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loukilaymen profile image
Aymen Loukil

Hi edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y and thank you for this question !

My short answer : Out-bound links are good.
Longer answer : The foundation of the WWW (World Wide Web) is about getting documents connected each other with links. There are many good reasons to make relevant external links :

  • Useful for users to find more related resources, additional ones. You may not / can't cover everything
  • Useful for Google and search engines : They need to connect the dots and explore the web to be able to propose the closest documents to users searches.
  • Useful for your ecosystem (customers, suppliers, local network, partners).

Many metrics Search engines could use to review the value of a link check some of them described in (Moz SEO learning center) [moz.com/learn/seo/external-link] and yeah i'm adding an external link :)

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music4india profile image
Music4india

Well I am seo expert too ! I agree with you abt out bound links but you will loose traffic if you do that. I prefer you make subpages for the required traffic for which you are making subpages. This is will even boost the pages which you are referring too. All the best ! :)

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vuild profile image
Vuild

All the busiest sites online link out a lot. Think: Google/Fb/Yt/Twitter/reddit & beyond.

On a technical level: outbound links make no difference. Inbound links, anchor text do.

All other factors being the same, outbound links will not make you rank any higher unless they spread awareness or improve the quality content.

"Losing" traffic via outbound links is not a real consideration if you are building a long term site but will impact conversions (on a typical landing page for example).