Outbound links. External Links.

[kevinbp]

I have been reading alot on SEO and there is something confusing about having "Outbound links. External Links." on your main ranking page.

Some say that

1. We shouldn't have any out bound links. (from Random website)
2. According to Yoast, we should have outbound links. (yoast.com)
3. we should have outbound links but we should add the "no-follow" tag. (from Random website)

Q: What should i do and follow?
If the answer is yes, how many outbound links is an appropriate amount per page?

[Keszi]

Hi Kevin,

This is a question that I get all the time. In my opinion, having outbound links to non-competitive, but still related and authority websites is good.

For ex. if we are talking about a travel website, it does not harm to include a link towards the city destination's wiki page, or links towards museums or other "things to be seen" in the area.

Always, when you think of placing an outbound link on your website, I advice to think on the visitor's intent, and help them discover possibilities, which make your product even more interesting in their "eyes".

But once again, this is my personal opinion.

I hope it has helped. Gr., Keszi

[Wayne76]

Hi Kevin!

ABSOLUTELY you want to link to authoritative sites that provide additional resources and/or source information. The reason is simple, it creates a better user experience, and that's what Google wants to foster.

In the past it was the belief of some that you might dilute pagerank or authority by linking out to external sites. That's not the case today, if it ever was.

There are, of course, good practice to linking out:

• Make sure it's relevant/on-topic
• Make sure the site you're linking to isn't spammy or in a bad neighborhood (meaning a shady website)
• Don't overdo it! There's no need to link out from every sentence or paragraph. Again, just ask yourself, "Does it make sense to link out from this term or phrase?" "Would it benefit the reader?"

Wayne

[Andy-Halliday]

Hi

I have to agree with both, having links to external websites isn't a bad thing, IMO it adds value to your website.

A simple way of looking at Google is that it was create by some university graduates who we're taught, like everyone at uni is to reference where you get your information from. So when they started 'Google' (I know it wasn't called Google initially), they used the fact if you linked of to somewhere it was like saying this website is a good source of information and the more links pointing at a page the more authoritative it must be, then came along SEO's who realised this and abused it and now you have a situation whereby too many spammy links will actually hurt your rankings.

But the core part of the algorithm which still helps rankings is outbound links, so if ever webmaster remove outbound links, google would suddenly struggle to rank websites.

Just image you are writing a university essay, does the link (source) add value to your article.

In terms of links in your footers, this is a bit different, this was an old black hat SEO tactic to stuff keyword anchor text links into your footer to boost other websites you owned, so links in the footer, think of more a user experience point of view rather than SEO, but a great question was asked on here (http://moz.com/community/q/sitewide-footer-links-bad-or-not).

Hope this was useful.

Thanks

Andy

[BBEXNinja]

A link is like an editorial vote from one website to another.

If you can vouch for the quality of the site you are linking to, don't hesitate to place the link, provided it is relevant and useful to your visitors (and not just there for some kind of reciprocal link agreement for SEO = Bad).

On the flip side, blogs and forums that encourage user contributions often add the "nofollow" attribute to links by default, because you, the webmaster, may not be able to vouch for the quality of the sites your readers are linking to in a comments section, and the links are possibly being placed as part of a link scheme for SEO.

So, in short,

If you are placing a link on a web page or article because you think the site provides useful information that enhances your content = Good, go for it!

If you or a visitor places a link for the sole purpose of ranking improvement for a particular keyword = Proceed with caution.