Outbound links

[Prospector-Plastics]

We are working with a large, global customer that has asked us to link to their website from about 5,000 pages of our website. The links would either point to one page on their website, or they would point to specific pages throughout their website.

Is this a bad thing from an SEO perspective, as in - would either of us be penalized from search engines for doing this?

[ske11]

It is not a good idea to link to one page or one site from every page of your site, these 5,000 links will not give them much if any benefit and it may harm them.

If you are in related industries they would probably be better off getting a few links from you from a few pages that are best suited to be linking to pages on their site.

Linking to another site should only be done if you can justify it by asking yourself if your visitors would be interested in the content of the page you are linking to.

I hope this helps

Sean

[jhinchcliffe]

If it is a Wordpress site (or something similar) with a link in the "blogroll" for example, I don't think either would be in deep trouble, but it might decrease your rankings. TIn the situation I described, it is acommon practice and is natural. However, it wouldn't help them too much as all the links come from one site. I would not recommend it though, you do not want a high number of outbound links. Google might think its a directory or something similar and decrease your rankings. Ideally you want a higher number of inbound links than outbound links.

Hope that helps

[Prospector-Plastics]

Both great answers - thank you Sean and Brighton College.

This just confirms my suspicion that it's not a good idea. You know that sickening feeling you get in your stomach when something doesn't feel right? That's the feeling I got when approached from our customer about doing this. I think that gut instinct as Sean alludes to has a lot of truth in SEO.

I agree with both of you on "it's better to have a few good outbound links" and "the more inbound quality links vs outbound, the better."

Thank you!