Cluster of outbound links on blog

[Bondara]

Hi,

If a blog has a section which contains 40 outbound links almost like a blogroll do you think Google looks at this cluster as suspicious?

Could this come across like paid links to Google?

[Chris.Menke]

If there is no reason for google to think they're paid links I wouldn't worry about it.  If they're to sites that show a pattern of back links that look somehow suspicious, (do the links show on numerous sites that are not relevant to the site being linked to or multiples of those links show up together on numerous sites) then I'd say to watch out.

[KaneJamison]

Things that will make these links look more suspicious include exact match anchor text, highly unrelated links (eg poker, viagra, attorney links on a gardening website), lots of low-quality websites that have other spammy indicators being linked to.

If it's a bunch of websites that have generally high quality metrics, using branded anchor text for the links, then you're probably fine. That will just look like a normal blogroll.