Is having too many outgoing external links bad?
-
I'm currently writing articles for my site Eugene Computer Geeks and remember reading somewhere that having more then 100 outgoing links is a bad idea.
I plan on writing lots of guides, and most of them will have several relevant links.
Some examples are: a virus removal/prevention guide I want to link to the different antivirus programs I'm recommending. Or on the "Free WIFI in Eugene, OR" guide, I plan on linking to all the businesses' websites that offer free wifi.
**Would having too many outgoing links hurt my rankings in anyway? **
If so, should I use the "nofollow" tag to prevent any harm? I always thought that having lots of relevant outgoing links was a good thing, but lately have been reading otherwise. What is all your opinions here at SeoMoz?
-
This post from Dr. Pete also explains the 100 link guideline, its origin, and how to think about it.
-
Thanks so much. You couldn't have answered my question better.
-
As long as you're linking to quality sites, those links will not directly hurt your rankings. If they are good for users and don't make your site look too spammy, then use them.
The general best practice is to have no more than 100 links on a page (followed or nofollowed). The main reason for this is that each link detracts from the amount of PageRank that flows through the links. This is meaningful for controlling the internal linking structure of your site to maximize your site's PageRank and help Google to understand which pages are most important. You can get an idea of how the PageRank link juice flows using this tool: http://www.ecreativeim.com/pagerank-link-juice-calculator.php
But if you really need to have more than 100 links, then use more than 100. Ultimately what gives the best experience for your users is going to help your site the most -- and while PageRank is still a ranking factor, it's not a top one.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Internal no follow links
I have just discovered that the WordPress theme I have been using for some time has no follow internal links on the blog. Simply put each post has an image and text link plus a 'read more'. The Read more is a no-follow which is also on my homepage. The developer is saying duplicate follow links are worse than an internal no follow. What is your opinion on this? Should I spend time removing the no follow?
Technical SEO | | Libra_Photographic0 -
INTERNAL ANCHOR TEXT LINKS
If your site has say 50 pages, and you have a anchor text link from the home page to that page, what should you do in response to last friday, I have 60 keywords in the top 10 and now thye are all in the top 30 at best. PAGE RANK is still 5s and 6s on all of these pages.... NO PROBLEM ON THIS SITE UNTIL LAST FRIDAY!
Technical SEO | | jdcline0 -
Link building question
ok so we paid the top firm in seo to help us build an seo strategy and i think we have a good one. We are changing our link building tactics and making more Pr related links and creating awesome content on blogs or our own site to generate traffic and links to our site. We have data from our engineer which should be interesting and we are going to sponsor events, do some link baiting with some of our articles, get a pr firm to get us some good articles on major sites and go to events around phily where we will have unique content and a unique perspective such as car shows ect. The problem is even though all the content will be linked to our site how do we link them. We got hit by penguin but in these articles or blogs should we use the anchor text for the word we are using. The company says dont do it right now bc we got hit with penguin and should only use the brand. I have no idea how only using the brand and not the keywords will magically make us rank for certain keywords. Anyone have an opinion. Thank you and we do pretty well with seo but we did get little bit of a hit with penguin that we are eliminating links and making a new way of thinking when it comes to link building. We also just hired a designer so we are going to build 100s of pages on the site to increase seo with unique content and that is also a goal of ours for the year. We have two marketers on staff and 4 programmers so we are able to do anything. Our urls are terrible but the rest of the site is pretty good
Technical SEO | | goldjake17880 -
Should I wory about spam domains linking to me?
A while ago my site had a pharmacy hack done to it and created a ton of spam links. I've since fixed the issues on my site but I'm still showing links from their sites. See screen shot: http://awesomescreenshot.com/0497cc147 I think they are links from the spam site to me and not my site "yakanger" linking to them correct? Do I need to worry about these? Can I get rid of them?
Technical SEO | | mr_w2 -
Do web pages have to be linked to a menu?
I have a situation where people search for terms like, say 1978 one dollar bill. Even though there never was a 1978 one dollar bill. I want to make a page to capture these searches but since there wasn't such a thing as a one dollar bill I don't want it connected to the rest of my content which is reality based. Does that make sense? Anyway, my question is, can I publish pages that aren't linked to my menu structure but that will be searchable or, am I going to have to figure out a way to make these oddball pages accessible through my menu?
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Are all duplicate pages bad?
I just got my first Crawl Report for my forum and it said I have almost 9,000 duplicate pages. When I looked at a sample of them though I saw that many of them were "reply" links. By this I mean the "reply" button was clicked for a topic yet since the crawler was not a member, it just brought them to the login/register screen. Since all the topics would bring you to the same login page I'm assuming it counted all these "reply" links as duplicates. Should I just ignore these or is there some way to fix it? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Xee0 -
Does the Referral Traffic from a Link Influence the SEO Value of that Link?
If a link exists, and nobody clicks on it, could it still be valuable for SEO? Say I have 1000 links on 500 sites with Domain Authority ranging from 35 to 80. Let's pretend that 900 of those links generate referral traffic. Let's assume that the remaining 100 links are spread between 10 domains of the 500, but nobody ever clicks on them. Are they still valuable? Should an SEO seek to earn more links like those, even though they don't earn referral traffic? Does Google take referral data into account in evaluating links? 5343313-zelda-rogers-albums-zelda-pictures-duh-what-else-would-they-be-picture3672t-link-looks-so-lonely.jpg Sad%20little%20link.jpg
Technical SEO | | glennfriesen1 -
How many days for a Backlink
Hi One week ago, i created a blog on wordpress added the url of my blog on google, bing and yahoo. In that blog i put a link of my webshop (the site im working on SEO) but when i checked the backlinks of my webshop (with seomoz tools and yahoo explorer) , the link from the blog still doesnt show. How many days it takes for a backlink to be registered ? Thanks
Technical SEO | | nipponx0