Linking out to relevant resources

[webguru2014]

Are there any do's & dont's for linking out to other helpful sites, has Moz got any best practice guides etc?

[vivekrathore]

As long as it's a decent, none malware hosting, none spammy site it won't have an adverse effect. If you trust the site and think it's passing a benefit to users then why not link those sites? it is a good sign of a trustworthy site if it links to good high quality sites as news sites, wikipedia, forbes, about.com, government sites, etc. I believe that it makes my pages richer information sources. I believe that it builds credibility.

Though I will prefer a no-follow tag on those links as a precaution if that sites becomes a spammy site in future. It will not effect your vistors not passes the link juice to the sites you are linking.

I believe that google gives credit for linking out and even if they don't your visitors will.

Hope this helps !

[JaneCopland]

Feel absolutely free to link out as often as you like to as many sources, as long as those sources are high-quality. I personally do not recommend nofollowing links "just in case" they are spammy in the future; the vast majority of the links you create will be to sites that will never suffer a spam problem (and if you are ever worried, perform a check on your site's outbound links once or twice a year).

As Anirban says, a site that links out to trustworthy sites makes itself look more trustworthy in return. A very simplistic way of looking at this is that spam websites link to spam websites and to trustworthy websites. Trustworthy websites _only _link out to other trustworthy websites. So while you're not giving the sort of positive signal that likely results in improved rankings, you are failing to give a negative signal.

If the links are user-generated, place a nofollow tag on them, but if they are editorial and added by you because you appreciate the resource, you can do this as often as you like (within reason, still don't create massive pages with thousands of outbound links!).