Outbound Links a good thing for your website!
DeGal SEO's take on outbound linking and why we think it's good!
As the SEO process that leads to SERP success is based on the search engines closely guarded search algorithms the only people that know the criteria for ranking are the search engines themselves.
There is a lot of talk about page rank and link building and the emphasis has always been on gaining quality one way links for search engine optimisation purposes. We agree with this line of thought and thoroughly recommend seeking these quality inbound links but...
“Outbound Links - DeGal SEO are probably the only SEO company currently encouraging outbound links as part of a SEO strategy - remember you read it here first! Outbound Links are good for SEO”
What has been established and can be taken from reading the search engines guides to recommended seo practices is sites that provide users with the most relevance will be rewarded. Now if in providing information there is an external website that is an authoritive figure or founding source of the information in the first place it makes perfect sense a user of your website would find this information beneficial so an outbound link should be rewarded or at least recognised.
By providing a quality outbound link to this source we feel you are adding weight and relevance to your own content! Take some of the pages within our own site that carry external links. On our Google Analytics advice page we provide 3 external links
- An Online Google Analytics Feature Video Tour - this provides a video tour of the program and reinforces our own brief summary
- An Online Google Analytics Learning Resource - this is a course that can be taken to fully understand how to implement and use Google Analytics
- A Direct Link to the Google Analytics Sign Up/In Page - If taking our advice on Google Analytics someone wants to get it they don't need to search for how to get it the link is there - we are aiding their user experience and reducing their need to make clicks
Having mentioned the Google Analytics product it is only natural that even if we covered every single point relating to the program a number of our visitors would still wish to visit the home page of the program. By providing easy outbound links we are providing value which the search engines define as a good SEO goal for any website!
Page Rank has no SEO standings
The old school thought of not outbound linking to maintain your page rank and "link juice" was all with the aim of building up your own website's page rank in the belief the higher the page rank the better your search engine results standing.
Google themselves state page rank is not a determining factor in the search algorithm so why still worry about outbound links?
Content and Relevancy should be your only SEO concern
Google and other search engines state relevancy and quality content will always be the cream that rises to the top of the search engine pile. Now being realistic why should DeGal SEO worry about linking to Google Analytics on one internal page - yes we have optimised the page to be relevant to Google Analytics search terms but we ourselves acknowledge the main Google Analytics site will always be a more appropriate search result for this than our own site!
What we hope to achieve is ranking for terms that include both SEO Keyword Terms and Google Analytics and if in indexing our page Google recognise's our attempt at providing useful content it is natural to think we will also be rewarded for this.
Ensure all outbound links are to as relevant a source as possible
A good way to ensuring your links go to an authoritive or relevant resource is to do a search engine search for the term yourself - what are the sites currently occupying the top SERP positioning?
It would be fair to say these sites are probably the sort of authoritive sites you should be linking to unless of course they are providing your direct business competition or would lead visitors to your rivals and competition.
