Outbound Links and their Probable Role on SEO

Google Search Engine has changed a lot and will be changing and the change is towards a more positive side. Searching with the most common words now do not yields results from content less websites; at-least for the top five results.

Content farms has been eliminated from the top ten results, blogs copying each other’s posts are getting eliminated; domains with unique and informative contents who were nowhere six months back are approaching up.

We will discuss today in brief about Outbound Links and their Probable Role on SEO.

From where the idea of Outbound Links took its origin

Sir Timothy John, better known as Tim Berners-Lee first shown the possibility to sharing information through hyperlinks. Obviously, if many documents are pointing towards a single document through hyperlinks, it should get importance. This was the basis why inbounding links were probably given importance for ranking of a domain in Google Search Result.

Thereafter many thoughts and manipulation went on. People discovered the way to manipulate and get a higher PageRank. Google probably started to publicly show a false green bar of PageRank to keep people happy.

Among various manipulations, obviously the cheaper yet “popular” way is to increase inbound links and decreasing the Outbound Links.

Links are still sold like potatoes and onions. But, it has been now quite clear the equation of buying thousands of Links like potatoes and onions for a domain to get a “better PageRank” has some limiting factor now.

The idea of Outbound Links and SEO

Points related to Outbound Links those might have positive or negative effect:

Number of Outbound Links per web page: If thousands of Outbound links goes from this webpage with very less hyperlinked text and normal text ratio, that can never be good. It is quite obvious, unless it is a directory it possibly can not deliver any unique content to the end user.

Number of Outbound Links per Domain : Just think about a domain having 30,000 webpages and all the pages are like the above example.

We are saying about thousands of Outbound Link from a page, not about few truly relevant outbound links. Do you think Google will treat this webpage very badly if we link to Markus Sobek’s article on Outbound Links?

Quality of the webpages in the Outbound Links and to Bad Neighborhoods: Relevant Outbound Links to Wikipedia, Online dictionaries said to have good effects as it simply proves two factors :

• The author at least spent 10 minutes thoughtfully for writing the article.
• The Outbound Links provide the option to the reader to know more about those particular topics, a kind of explanation without the need to search again in the web.

Outbound Links to a already well known bad domain might have ill effects. It does not mean one link will kill the domain, but if you love to link such 5-6 domains as friend links in your widgeted footer or the sidebar, that might not be good.

Outbound Links to 404 and other error pages must to be avoided.