SEO Snippet: Outbound Links

January 8th, 2007

Talking about outbound links always turns into a bit of a frenzy when mentioned on SEO forums, with sides saying outbounds links can improve your rankings, some saying it can harm them and others suggesting it has absolutely no impact at all.

Let me clear this up with a simple statement: Outbound links can effect how many pages you have spidered and therefore have an impact on your ranking [in Google]. Linked is a post Matt Cutts made back in May ‘06 when he was helping out webmasters with their SEO. He was highlighting the irrelevant outbound links on the bottom of their pages were affecting how deep their site was crawled.

My advice is this: If the content is not related, why are you linking to it? Google also does not like paid for links, so if you have any of them, which are not relevant, use the nofollow= attribute to let Google know they are paid for. Improved user experience, improved search results.