Outgoing Links on pages and posts have become increasingly important for determining a page’s rank. SEO masters know this and use outgoing links to increase their overall page ranking.
Now you maybe thinking to yourself, why do I want to give away backlinks for free by linking out? It seems to be a contradiction when trying to attract website visitors by then sending them away. As it turns out, providing links creates what is known as a hub site. A great example of this is the Drudge Report,where the home page is mostly backlinks to other news sources and stories. Complete websites are designed around the outgoing links concept.
Drawbacks To Outgoing Links
There are some drawbacks to outgoing links. When Google or another search engine discovers one of these links and the link does not have the “no-follow” tag, Google follows that link and starts crawling it. If the landing page of the link contains spam or contains content Google deems inappropriate, they flag your website. In most cases you should probably use the NoFollow link attribute (rel=”nofollow”), just to be safe. If you are going to allow follow links, you should review the website or page you’re linking to.
Advantages To Outgoing Links
There are certainly a lot of advantages to outgoing links. Many times when I am looking at Google Analytics, I can see who is linking to my site that I might not otherwise know about. So the outgoing links can get a website noticed by other website owners. Many times website owners will link back to you if it makes sense for them to do so.
- Link out to get noticed
- Link out to get backlinks
- Become a Hub Website
