The Effect of Outbound Links on Your Website

Dec 08, 2006

Be careful when you link to other websites. Although linking to external links adds value to your website’s overall content, here’s how they effect your website:

Outbound links get you inbound links

If you link to people, they will most probably link back to you. Ideally you should avoid the “you scratch my back and I scratch yours” sort of arrangement, because the exchange should enhance the quality of both the websites. But that apart, if you link a lot, you are linked to a lot too, unless you could be an embarrassment to the linker.

Outbound links increase the quality of your website

Your website can become an invaluable resource if it has plenty of useful outbound links. This happens if you put outbound links keeping your visitors in mind, not just for the sake of exchanging links. Once you have a page full of quality outbound links, your visitors would rather bookmark your page than bookmark all those linked pages individually. This can bring you lots of repeat traffic.

Outbound links to spammy or porn websites can land you in trouble

Be careful whom you link to. For instance the SEOmoz people are trying to sort out all those members who link to nefarious websites because the profiles of their registered members are available online and they are indexed by the search engines. So indirectly, because of the shady outbound links, even SEOmoz can be branded as a bad website by the search engines.

So be careful what sort of links you put on your website, and keep checking their quality regularly.

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