SEO Question: Why Should I Add Outbound Links?
I’ve been told I need to create outbound links from my site pages to rank better in Google. Why are outbound links important to my site? Surely they just let visitors leave and go elsewhere?
Deeho Says:
Sites with outbound, relevant, contextual links tend to rank higher than pages without any outbound references. The reason for this is that Google want you to recommend other great content in preference to reproducing their content on your page.
For example, if your page is discussing a particular law, you could quote the legal jargon word for word within your content, or, you can link to the government site page that contains the original legal jargon.
From Googles point of view, they would rather you reference the original source of the information.
The downside is that potentially, your visitors may click the link and leave your site, but if you set these links to open in a new tab or a new window then your page will still be open and available.
The most important point is to link to Google friendly, highly regarded websites, rather than low quality spammy sites.
The easiest way to achieve this is to choose one of the most relevant, top ranking sites to link to. If the page ranks well for the keyword that you want to rank for then you will be promoting and assisting a competitor, so care needs to be taken to try to link to not competing sites if possible.
This can be a challenge as you need to remain relevant. Any visitors that click those links need to find what you are recommending, otherwise (if they bounce back or leave the page) it won’t help your rankings.
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