My site contains lists of universities around the web and direct link to their official websites. I have read some where that including too mnay out links in your website is not good in respect of SEO.
So what should I do as this inevitable for me because of my content.
Set them as nofollow and you won’t be penalized for it.
As advice goes, that’s pretty useless. There is no maximum number of outgoing links beyond which you get penalised.
Just link to the pages you want to link to. That’s how the web is supposed to work.
I agree with hooperman. Google’s Matts Cutts says that Google wants our websites to look human. And with your kind of site what you’re doing is the obvious human thing to do.
One of my webpages is made up solely of lists of good videos, each of which is a link. And I had no problems getting ranked well for it. It sounds pretty similar to what you’re doing.
Hooperman is right. The ONLY time you’ll be penalized for outbound links is if you’re linking to “bad neighborhood” sites… sites who are violating Google’s webmaster guidelines. If a bad neighborhood site gets penalized and you’re linking to it then Google can also penalize you for helping to promote such a site. So link to sites you think are legitimate and useful to your visitors. If you’re not 100% of their legitimacy, then either don’t link to them or link to them with a rel=“nofollow” attribute.
The only problem with having pages with lots of outbound links is that everytime you add links to the page, you reduce the amount of PR/link juice that gets passed out. But typically adding a few links to a page will NOT make any noticeable difference in the amount of PR/link juice that is passed out.
A simplified way to think of it is that if a page has X amount of PR or link equity and 10 outbound links then “about” X/10 PR/link juice/link equity is passed out on each link. If that page has 100 links on it then about X/100 PR/link juice/link equity is passed out on each link.
This isn’t “exactly” correct because there is a “damping” factor in Google’s PR algorithm that causes a certain amount of PR to decay or disappear… So in reality, the amount of PR passed out on each link is actually about 10-15% less than X/(num outbound links) depending on the damping factor setting at that point in time.
I dont think with many outlinks your site can get penalized. Its fine if we give outlinks but there should also be good inlinks against them.