Do Outbound Links Damage Rankings

By Adam  |  8 Jun 2016 12:00:00

When people are doing content marketing, they're often a little concerned about including links to other sites in their content. A lot of people believe that search engines work like this: every site has a certain value and when it links to another site it is giving them some of its value and, therefore, decreasing its own value. Because of this, some people do not like to link to other sites unless they know that they can get a link back from the site that they linked to.

The explanation I just provided, however, is not very accurate. Some people might never include any outbound links due to the fear of damaging their own rankings, but the truth is that doing this might actually be even more harmful. Outbound links don't actually damage the ranking of your site (unless, say, you gave out thousands and didn't get any back) and in actuality it's more a case of each page you create having its own value, but then if there's a link on that page, the value of that individual page is shared with the other site. Each new page, each new piece of content you create will add value to your site and when you link to others that new value is shared. Even this is a huge over simplification, but it should help you to see that links of this kind are not necessarily harmful. Never including outbound links could actually harm your site, as Google might see this as suspicious.

So if you were worried about including outbound links, hopefully this has put your fears to rest. One thing which Google takes into account is how natural the activity on the site appears: no outbound links would seem suspicious, hundreds of thousands of outbound links would look suspicious, but a handful of outbound links is normal and acceptable, so don't worry about putting them on your eCommerce website! But if you don't even have an eCommerce website, then sign up to Sellr now and get started for no cost at all.