Thread: Increasing outbound links

Hi,

I had a chat with a guy who owns hundreds of sites, which are making him a fortune (no, not Will ). I asked him about his approach and what he does on his sites, SEO-wise, in order to get ranked well. Apart from saying that quality is what matters, he said one thing that was really something completely different from what I thought before: he said that it actually helps your SERPs signficantly IF you put more STRONG outbound links on your site. I never really thought about that; I always tried to lower the number of outgoing links. He claims that by putting a few strong (the ones that already rank) outbound links on your site, your SERPs will improve.

What is your opinion about this?

That's been on my list of things to test for a long time now.

It shouldn't be that difficult to design and execute a reasonably trustworthy test for this theory.

Looking backwards, I do note that on 22 June I converted thousands of outbound links on about ten sites from nofollow links to dofollow links. Traffic on one site increased, traffic on another site decreased. There has been no noticeable change in traffic on the other eight sites.

It is true to some extent that strong outbound links through particular keywords (like wikipedia, about.com, seobook, and other authority sites in discussed niche) helps in SERPs.. But it works over a good time. Doesn't seem to work as quickly as some strong inbound links. But it does help.

2-3 strong outbound links per 400-500 words and as per relevancy work.

Thanks

Simply increasing the number of outbound links on a page will not improve how that URL ranks in the SERPs at Google. However, if you link out to "trusted" sites this can increase your domain trust which is one thing that Google supposedly looks at as one of their 200+ ranking factors. Like all of Google's ranking factors, no one factor is going to make your URL rank well... It's always the sum of lots of little things that make a page rank.

The powerful thing about increasing your domain trust is that it is a domain wide ranking factor like domain age, domain authority, etc. So increasing your domain trust helps EVERY URL on your site to rank slightly better.

There is an excellent video on Domain Trust and Domain Authority from the guys at SEOmoz which explains how to build trust.

hmmm, I guess my post did not save.

I wrote how the ultramarine contest a few years back had a top 3 site that was almost exclusively outbound links using the keyword phrase ( and mixes of similar)

I am assuming it was seen as an authoritative site and since then I am not afraid to link to related sites even using a keyword phrase I want to rank for.

Sites with large amounts of strong outbound links are hub sites. Hubs get their juice from outbounds. As opposed to authority sites that are juiced from inbounds.

Care to share an example of one of these "hub sites" that have almost exclusively outbound links with very few, if any, inbound links yet rank well for a particular keyword? Please share the exact URL and keyword phrase they rank for as well. I have never heard any prominent SEO talk of such a thing.

I would be testing this soon on a couple of my sites

Originally Posted by Canonical

Care to share an example of one of these "hub sites" that have almost exclusively outbound links with very few, if any, inbound links yet rank well for a particular keyword? Please share the exact URL and keyword phrase they rank for as well. I have never heard any prominent SEO talk of such a thing.

Any of the sites that I can give to you as examples of "hub sites" are authority sites at the same time like ODP and Yahoo Directory. In the world of seo the best that we can offer are observations. The only way to prove something as fact would be to confirmation from the search engines or to be able to take at look at their algorithm. Which btw can change at any time.

Don't believe it sorry!

I'm sure the reason it appears to work is that the reverse pattern of the bots trace that link from the destination thus indexing the source.

After this you might see pages indexed, but there is no logical reason this would lead to higher page rank.

Wikipedia is No.1 for most links because it has long pages and no out bound (dofollow) links.