Is Linking Out Useful For SEO?

There are a lot of people who think that external linking from your website to another is bad for SEO and takes ‘link juice’ away from your own site. Linking out is often avoided as some companies think it can damage their reputation and negatively affect their search engine rankings by deferring traffic from their site, but is this really true?

Problems with Linking Out

Well, it’s true there are some problems which can arise when you start linking out to external sites from your own website or blog. Where you link to can say a lot about your site itself, so you need to make sure you’re linking to reliable sources and not pages with poor page authority.

Linking out to competitors can also lead to problems as you could be directing customers and enquiries away from your own content and towards another company.

Although your competitors will have content which is relevant to your own, linking out to them isn’t in the best interests of your business.

If your blog has a spammy, low page authority website linking to it, this can damage your search engine rankings. It also has the possibility of making your site look unreliable. This means you will not have the perfect SEO link profile. Giving out links to bad sites can be just as bad as receiving links from bad sites. So make sure you’re only linking out to authoritative sources.

What Sites Should You Be Linking To?

This check-list gives you an idea of what you should be looking for when you’re trying to find relevant sites to link out to:

  • Benefits for user experience – is the page you’re linking to going to help the reader find what they’re looking for?
  • No competition with your own site or business – linking to competitors will benefit them more than you, so avoid this.
  • Building a positive relationship – Creating a rapport with another blog author can lead to more benefits for your in the future.
  • Good authority and reliability – Make sure you’re linking out to reliable sites that look good and have authority in your particular niche

The Best Ways to Link Out

When you’re linking out from your blog, you need to make sure that the outbound links you’re building are natural and enhance user experience. This is why you should try not to create a page with a list of outbound links to different sites. There needs to be enough actual content to back it up.

These pages often don’t get indexed in search results as the lack of content means they aren’t seen as valuable. Instead, get links within your content on different pages of your website or blog using anchor text.

This makes it easier for the reader to access further relevant information as they read your content. It also helps to to index the different pages on the website.

Another way to link out would be to link to your own site. Many people build articles which will support your other pages in order to improve the existing pages.

For details on how to do this, please click here.

Is External Linking Good for SEO?

As a quick answer to this question, external linking is good for SEO as it shows Google that you can link your work to others. When linking out it is important to make certain that the link is to a good quality, high authority site so you do not get penalised for linking to a bad site.

Although some people may not like linking out, as they don’t want to pass any of their power to another site, it is recommended. It shows Google you can link to other related sites and it makes it look more natural.

External Linking SEO

Overall, external linking is an important part of SEO and something every site should take into account. There are various benefits to linking out, as it helps your site look a lot more natural, so you are not hoarding your ‘link juice’.

external linking seo

There are a number of different things to think about when carrying out external linking. This helps ensure you are not linking out to a site that will have a negative effect on your website.

It’s not just external links you need to think about. Silo structure internal linking is just as important. In order to get the very best out of your linking profile, you will need to make sure your silo structure and link profile is up to scratch.

Outbound Links Checker

There are a number of outbound links checker tools to choose from on the web. It is a good idea to use one of these to check your outbound links. You will not only want to check what pages you link out to but what pages are linking to you.

With an outbound links checker you can check the sites you are linking to. You could then make certain they have a reasonably high domain authority and they are not spammy. Also check who is linking to you and see if you’re being penalised because of a poor site linking to you.

If you find a spammy site is linking to your website, you can to disavow the link and remove them. This means you will no longer have this link.

It would also be a good idea to check the anchor text and make certain that you have a good anchor text profile. You should fill your anchor text with keywords so Google knows what you want to be ranking for.

Google will find out what you are trying to rank for by crawling your site. If you are unsure about the Google bot crawl, it is recommended to find out about this.

Linking Out Tests

If you want to see the tests and proof that linking out actually helps your site then visit this outgoing link experiment study. The study tested in total 10 websites where they did 5 with outbound links and 5 without. The results from the test was conclusive and all 5 sites linking out were the best five ranking websites.

You should never listen to blogs you read without tests or proof. The article from Reboot Online is firm evidence that answers Is Linking Out Useful For SEO? The testing is amazing because disproves the old myth of Pagerank retention. Now you know that linking out is useful for SEO then link out and prosper.

Over To You

Did you find this post helpful? Are there any particular techniques that you have found to be successful for linking out to relevant sites?

Let us know your views and any extra tips you have in the comments below. Also please share this post if you thought it was interesting!

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