How to use outbound links in your SEO

When considering creating outbound links, it may seem anti-productive in gaining you better SEO. Linking to other sites in theory won’t boost your position on the Google search results and may just boost the sites you’ve linked.

However, linking to other websites is actually a good thing to do when you are producing blog content. There are a number of benefits for outbound links that will both help your SEO and help you. 

Crawling 

Crawling is when Google explores the pathways of different links to find new websites to add to Google’s web results. It does this by moving from one website to another and indexing these pages. When your blog post has no links, this ends the crawling and can have multiple impacts.

For one, though it knows how it got to your site, the crawler will not have any idea on the content your page is related to. Instead it will only be the content that relates to you. Google and other search engines use crawling as a way to establish the website's authority by analysing the links it is allowed to crawl to. This means that if you link in your text to something relating to your blog post, it will boost the search engines' understanding of your content.

When you decide to do an outbound link, try to use it in conjunction with the keywords related to your topic. This helps boost your own ranking, as inclusion of keywords is one of the main tactics in SEO, and makes the link easier to establish. 

Picking the right content

Another thing to consider when creating an outbound link is picking the right content. The information you link to should be considered as important as the information you don’t link to.

Firstly you should never over saturate your content with links as Google may see this as spam. On the topic of spam, you should also only choose content that is reliable and from a respected source. If you link to a site that is filled with ads and spam then this will reduce the chance of the search engine recommending your site.

You should also pick content that clearly links to the content that you have produced.

Strengthen your own argument

Another reason for using good content is that it will strengthen your argument and your topic signal. External links boost the topic signal of the content to Google and promotes the topic and in turn may help promote your own article.

A way to boost topic signal is linking in the text as it makes navigation easier. This also has benefits for your content in that it provides more authenticity to your content. 

Strengthen relations with other creators

There is a benefit to using outbound links not directly linked to SEO and that is building relations with other blog creators. Facilitating a relationship with a blogger who blogs on similar topics can potentially result in mutually beneficial linking.

It also means Google will make more of a connection with your content and push it in similar searches to the ones the website you are linked to are shown in. 

To nofollow or not

A nofollow link is a link you have told the search engines not to follow. Whilst prior Google updates allowed for nofollow links to have similar effects as follow links, this is not the case anymore.

Instead it has the effect of not having any outbound links in your SEO content. You can use these if you feel the need to back up a lot of your information but a blanket nofollow ban is not advisable. 

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