Do Outgoing Links Affect SEO?
Incoming links are essential in gaining better SEO rankings. Now that visitors have come to your website, should you provide them with external links? What if they click on your outgoing links, leave your site, and never come back? Do outgoing links affect your SEO effort?
They may. However, you must remember that your visitors will still leave after they’ve accomplished their goal. When you try to box them, you still can’t stop them from leaving your webpage.
And if your certain visitors aren’t relevant to your website, you should provide them with useful directions and give them links that might offer them the things they’re looking for that they couldn’t find on your website. Remember, being nice to your users is one way to build your online reputation.
Outgoing Links
However, you shouldn’t just provide your users links to sites that are garbage as they would consider your own site as garbage. For that reason, it’s vital to avoid link farming and reciprocal link schemes. Your site must only link to high-quality resources to show to the world that you care for your visitors.
In addition to helping your visitors, quality, relevant outgoing links will improve your online reputation and search engine ranking. This will then lead to more inbound links. Your site will also experience higher response rates. And if you have external links that are of high-quality, your visitors will even bookmark your page and use it as a resource to jump from one point to another. With a well-referenced page, your site will become more authoritative.
Then again, outgoing links may affect your search engine ranking. They can be beneficial if they’re done properly. Thus, it’s essential that you test outbound links to fix anything. This will ensure that outbound links are not broken. If you include an outbound link that’s broken, Google may take it as a sign that yours is also out of date. This will signal search engines to lower your ranking.
Zero Outgoing Links
Links make the Internet unique. Thus, if your site doesn’t have outbound links, it can be a dead end for your visitors. People don’t want to visit sites that are dead ends. Thus, it will definitely affect your traffic. Google and other search engines will consider your web page to be of an inferior resource. These search engines want websites to recommend the best sites that are related to their web pages.
If you’re wondering how outgoing links could affect your own SEO campaign, talk to an SEO expert to help you understand them.
