Are there any facts known about the influence of outbound links to your site serp, or is it nothing but rumour?
I have seen anything from “major importance” to have outbound links to authoirty sites, down to “makes no difference and can even hurt if you have too many”.
Outbound links do improve your credibility a little. Links to the relevant, authority websites show that you have done the research part correctly and that you have expertise in the subject matter.
Not just this, they also help to expand your website’s visitors and build relationships with niche-related webmasters.
Outbound links to relevant sites can add value to your own content and improve the value of your site to your visitors. For those reasons, they are good thing.
But if you are asking if they have any effect on your own site’s search engine ranking, the answer is no.
Mike
Yes, that was indeed the question. Making the site interesting for vistiors, is, in my case, very easy. Increasing numbers, low bounce rate, and good feedback prove that. My main question by far is: how do I drive up visitor numbers from search engines? In ohter words, I need to increase my serp position for more keywords.
I think that is a new and different question:)
This is a good answer. How much it helps it’s very difficult to say, but it must improve your ‘credibility’ with Google.
Over 100 OBLs can hurt you, or at least Google themselves advise against more than that.
Is that a deduction, or “measured”?
How do outbound links expand your website’s visitors?
I hadn’t seen this particular recommendation so I took a look.I found a blog by Matt Cutts from 2009: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/
The opening paragrapgh includes "it seemed like a good time to talk about Google’s recommendation to “Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).”
Follow that link to webmaster guidelines and the recommendation is: “Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.” The “(fewer than 100)” part is no longer stated.
So is a “reasonable number” now less than 100 or greater than 100?
There are two separate issues here.
The original question was whether having any outbound links would enhance a site’s reputation or authority. I think we agree on the answers to that.
But the “100 links” issue is quite different. That’s about whether having an excessive number of links will appear spammy. The reference that Ozsubasi posted suggests that it won’t (but that doesn’t mean it’s good practice).
Mike
Nice research. I guess it’s now up to us to figure out what’s ‘reasonable’, just like we have to to figure out what ‘excessive’ reciprocal linking is.
Like many things with SEO, it’s context specific. A directory will necessarily have many OBLS, a blog may have a lot because of comments, a railway timetable page might not have any… etc etc
If you have an info site and you don’t link out, I have to think that’s not helping you.