Outbound Links and Your Ranking
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An outbound link is a link from your web site to another web site. Outbound links add value to your site by providing useful information to your users. At the same time outbound links provide PageRank for the target page. Some search engines algorithms place value on sites with relevant outbound links.
If you are going to place links on your site follow the same guidelines that you were following when you were building your site, make the outbound links relevant to your site.
Something that I do and it really works is find high page rank (PR) sites with related content, I use an average of 50 sites and believe me it help me a lot to increase the ranking of my web sites and my client’s web sites. But consider this as a small variable in the equation.
Most people don’t consider these little factors but at the end they can affect your ranking “big time”. There was an article about (-)* SEO (28/6/07) in some well known magazine, a lot of sites that were linking or were making a reference to that article or to the web site named in that article lost their top positions, so conclusion, yes!, outbound links count!!!. *(-) = Negative
The same happens in real life if you hang with the wrong people, others will point of you as being as equal as them, so be careful when you choose your outbound links because there are only 2 options, it will help you to increase your ranking or it will “damage” your reputation with the search engines, what would you choose?.
There is a very interesting tool that allow me to select my outbound link based in a) The content of my website b) Page Rank. This tool is called PageRank Search, I did a search for the term “SEO “and as you can see below I got some sites that are relevant to the content of my site and with high PR.
Create a link page called “links” or “resources” or any name, and add those sites on it. The most important bit here is the content and if you deliver quality content (relevant sites with high PR) you will see that your ranking on the search engines will get only better.
James G. Evans
