How outbound links influence your search engine rankings

While most webmasters are aware that incoming links are important to the success of a website, many site owners don't know that outgoing links also have an impact on their websites.

1. The positive side of outbound links

Links to other websites show your website visitors that your website can be trusted. You wouldn't send visitors to other pages if they could find negative information about your products or services on other sites.

Links add value to your website, they show your visitors that you have nothing to hide and that you have confidence in your site. The websites to which you link help your website visitors to put your website into a larger context. If you link to high quality sites with useful content, web surfers will associate your website with these high quality sites.

If you don't have outgoing links or if you hide your links, then you send your visitors back to search engines. If you offer your website visitors links, you can send leaving visitors to other websites that can send you their visitors in return. Carefully chosen links to outside resources can improve the experience of visitors who visit your website.

Don't be afraid that you drive people away by offering links on your website. You either have interesting content on your website or you have not. People eventually will leave your website, no matter how interesting your website is. Even you don't visit your own website all the time.

2. The negative side of outbound links

Links to other websites can also have a negative effect. If you link to websites that are obviously spammers then search engines might ban your website from their search results.

Just use common sense, if a website looks shady or if the techniques on that website look to good to be true (for example: "Get 500 links per day with our automated system") then don't link to that website.