How many outbound links is too many outbound links?

[airnwater]

As a part of our SEO strategy, we have been focusing on writing several high quality articles with unique content.  In these articles we regularly link to other websites when they are high quality, authoritative sites. Typically, the articles are 500 words or more and have 3-5 outbound links, but in some cases there are as many as 7 or 8 outbound links.

Before we get too carried away with outbound links, I wanted to get some opinions on how many outbound links we should be trying to include and more information on how the outbound links work. Do they pass our website's authority on to the other website? Could our current linking strategy cause future SEO problems?  Finally, do you have any suggestions for guidelines we should be using?

Thank you for your help!

[irvingw]

You are leaking your PR to these other websites, and if not opening in a new window, you're increasing your bounce rate and lowering the time spent on your site.

7 to 8 outbound links on an article is a tremendous drain of your internal PR and could also send Google the false signal that you are selling links since they are dofollow.

I would remove outgoing links, if you need them as references then nofollow them and target="_blank" them. You are still losing some PR with nofollowing them, but Google can read them and still see that you are linking to them if that is your intention. I would allow Google, FB links for example to be dofollow, but would no follow lesser known sites.

[TakeshiYoung]

There is no set amount of outbound links that are the "right" amount. Just use common sense and don't be spammy about it.

Linking to other sites does pass some link value to their sites, so make sure that they are high quality sites. Linking to low quality sites can get you penalized. On the flip side, linking to high authority sites is believed to give your site a slight boost.

[littlesthobo]

Very helpful answer thanks (even though it wasn;t me who asked the question!).  If a forum allows lots of low quality dofollow backlinks, e.g. in signatures, would they be penalised?