Is having outbound links good or bad?

All of us worry about the number of inbound links that come to our website as it has a tremendous positive effect on our website’s page rank and on the search ranking. We build our links through one-way link building, social book marking and reciprocal link exchange. Among these, reciprocal link exchange is a problem area. If we engage in reciprocal link exchange, we need to link to as many websites as we get links from and this means that there are going to be as many outbound links. Very few people worry about the number of outbound links that their site has.

According to Google’s official blog, you should not worry about outbound links generally. This should happen in a natural fashion and this increases your website’s credibility as it provides its users with the best information available and the related resources. When you are linking that is why you should link only to websites that are related to your service, product or your website. Irrelevant links may have negative effect and it can spoil the reputation of your website. If possible you can add commentary on each of the outbound links that you have in your website. This will also help you in adding more content that is keyword rich and at the same time help the users with the information that they need. They need not visit a site if they know in advance that it is not going to help them. This will save them time and they can always visit if they would like to explore the linked website at their own discretion. However, your site will be an information worthy site.

If you add relevant links that are useful to your website’s users then it makes you a specialist in that field and hence you will get more visitors returning to your website. Though there are number of positive points in having outbound links, in order to avoid any possible abuse, there are certain factors search engines pay attention to. Google for instance considers unmonitored links and paid advertising outbound links to be bad.

If you have a lot of outgoing links then your website visitors can easily be confused with regard to the resources that you are providing them. Google encourages you to keep the number of outbound links     per page to be below 100. When you have paid links or too many links in a page that go out, then it can be an indication of paid links and this can frustrate the experts and well informed users. You can lose a lot of potential visitors. One of the major sources of website traffic is certainly repeat visitors and you cannot afford to miss out that advantage.

Therefore, when you are use reciprocal link exchange as your link building strategy make sure that the links are well categorized and that each link has some explanatory text to help visitors and above all, keep the count to less than 100 per page.

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