Do follow links

[Obbserv]

Is it good(according to SEO) to give dofollow rel to external links of highly trusted websites from our content?

[TomRayner]

Hi Ravi

In short, you should be looking to link out to external, authority resources if you think it would be beneficial for the user.  Make that your main focus when doing so.

Having said that, let's look at the SEO theory behind this.  Some SEO's argue that linking out to authority websites from your content can help your own SEO.  The theory they site is that if you link to authority articles/websites within your industry from your own content/website, then your own website will be associated with that industry and subsequent authority.  This is the lexical co-occurrence theory.  The genius that is Bill Slawski goes over this topic in great depth here.

So is it really a case of linking to authority sites to be associated with them?  To be honest, I doubt it.  I don't think that part of the algorithm could be gamed so easily.  Is it likely to have a negative effect on your SEO.  Again, I'd say that's very unlikely.

If you subscribe to that theory, I don't think you'd have anything to lose - although you are sending a potential lead away from your website (plus diluting your link equity of the page a bit with an external link).  There certainly is not enough evidence or case studies to support the claim, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it wouldn't work.  In my own personal opinion, however, I don't think this will have any sort of noticeable impact on your SEO.

My $0.02. Hope this helps.

[DirkC]

Great reply from Tom. The other way to see it (more from philosophical nature) - by definition the 'world wide web' is

'The World Wide Web (www, W3) is an information system of interlinked hypertext documents that are accessed via the Internet and built on top of the Domain Name System'. (Wikipedia)

If you site only has only incoming links, and no outgoing links - it's like a dead end street (or and end-node) and would be a bit in contradiction of what the www is (was) all about. It would also seem that you are convinced that your site has all the possible answers / solutions for a certain topic and that you are convinced that no other site could be of interest for your visitors.

No hard facts or figures to support this theory, just my gut feeling.  If you have a number of good external references that have added value content for your visitors I would certainly link to them.

rgds,

Dirk