How many outbound links is too many outbound links?
-
As a part of our SEO strategy, we have been focusing on writing several high quality articles with unique content. In these articles we regularly link to other websites when they are high quality, authoritative sites. Typically, the articles are 500 words or more and have 3-5 outbound links, but in some cases there are as many as 7 or 8 outbound links.
Before we get too carried away with outbound links, I wanted to get some opinions on how many outbound links we should be trying to include and more information on how the outbound links work. Do they pass our website's authority on to the other website? Could our current linking strategy cause future SEO problems? Finally, do you have any suggestions for guidelines we should be using?
Thank you for your help!
-
Very helpful answer thanks (even though it wasn;t me who asked the question!). If a forum allows lots of low quality dofollow backlinks, e.g. in signatures, would they be penalised?
-
There is no set amount of outbound links that are the "right" amount. Just use common sense and don't be spammy about it.
Linking to other sites does pass some link value to their sites, so make sure that they are high quality sites. Linking to low quality sites can get you penalized. On the flip side, linking to high authority sites is believed to give your site a slight boost.
-
You are leaking your PR to these other websites, and if not opening in a new window, you're increasing your bounce rate and lowering the time spent on your site.
7 to 8 outbound links on an article is a tremendous drain of your internal PR and could also send Google the false signal that you are selling links since they are dofollow.
I would remove outgoing links, if you need them as references then nofollow them and target="_blank" them. You are still losing some PR with nofollowing them, but Google can read them and still see that you are linking to them if that is your intention. I would allow Google, FB links for example to be dofollow, but would no follow lesser known sites.
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
-
Best practice for Portfolio Links
I have a client with a really large project portfolio (over 500 project images), which causes their portfolio page to have well over the 100 links that are recommended. How can I reduce this without reducing the number of photos they can upload?
On-Page Optimization | | HochKaren0 -
Internal Linking Question(s)
Is it unwise to link internally to a page more than once on the homepage. I am reading that it is considered spammy. I am also reading that it passes PR twice to the internal page instead of just once... Which is it? Is there a way to stop passing PR to the "contact us" page. I watched an older video that Matt Cutts suggested a nofollow. Now I read that this strategy is a no no? Which is it? Thanks! 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | JML11790 -
Several Links in Some Pages
Dear all, Our main site is a bussiness directory, and following some SEO advices, we are creating landing pages for each category, in order to optimize them for the keywords. Those landing pages have links to the listings related to them. Using the same idea, we have created pages related to the regions, and those pages include links to the listings located in them. The only problem that I see with that, is the number of links that some categories or regions could have. Is there a limit of recomended number of links per page, from a SEO perspective? We also have a main category page, that includes a list of all categories, and this page could also have a relatively high number of links. The pages have around 300 to 500 words, some include also images, some include videos. Many thanks for your help, Daniel
On-Page Optimization | | te_c0 -
Should i nofollow outgoing links on posts
Hello, on my blog i don't nofollow the outgoing links inside roundups like : http://www.designzzz.com/extreme-demos-html5-jquery/ a friend of mine suggest me to nofollow all out going links in such postings. he added that it will help increase posts PRs and better search rankings. Any thoughts? cheers
On-Page Optimization | | wickedsunny10 -
SEOmoz tells me that I have too many links, however most of them are comments...
Is this affecting the overall ranking of the page? http://www.smileclinic.sk/zubne-implantaty/ (164) http://www.smileclinic.sk/zubne-korunky/ (179) If so how can I disallow them? We use Wordpress with the Joost SEO plugin, but I don't see a disallow option there for comments...
On-Page Optimization | | danielshaw0 -
I have a question about on page links or duplicate contant
Ok help me out here friends. I’m working with the warnings and errors for my site. I have two problems that relate to each other and I want to know if you had to choose what problem what would you choose. I’m running into some duplicate content and title errors because under categories for my products there are so many products that it creates more than one page and with each new page it has the same title or same content on the page. I tried to make this less in some cases by showing more products per page like 100 items and in most cases per category it will only show one page now. Now some times there’s still more than one page and also this creates too many links now on that category page. So I think I can get rid of all the to many on page links but it will make more pages and duplicate content and title tag. What would you guys do?
On-Page Optimization | | Dataken0 -
product links
If you sell a range of products say 3 at the most, all on their own pages, is it ok to link to the other products within the range from each page? I have tried this and it eventually leads back to the same page is this a good, bad or doesn't really matter thing? Also is the anchor text still important?
On-Page Optimization | | LadyApollo0 -
Navigation Links in Footer
What are your thoughts about navigation links in the footer? For example: www.chasepaymentech.com - good, bad, or indifferent for SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | kasi0