Over at Sitepoint forums, Aspen (a very well-respected and knowledgable member of their community) disagrees with me on whether outbound links on a web page can affect your rankings at the search engines.
My views:
"I believe that search engines use outbound links like any other type of on-page content to help determine things like "trust", "quality" and "authority". It may not provide a large boost, but by linking to high quality sites that are relevant to your page topics, you're showing search engines (and visitors) that you take the quality of your own pages seriously and are linking with care and intent (rather than for advertising or link exchange purposes)."
"If a page on the topic of spiders links to a scientific american article on cave spiders, the wikipedia entry on spiders and a page on what spiders eat, and another page on "spiders" links to Google's "spider" data, information about web crawling, etc. - you are going to see the SEs recognize the relevance of the outgoing links as making the page about one subject or another."
His points:
Thats like saying by using meta tags you're showing that your pages are of high quality. Outgoing links are meaningless in this regard. Anyone can add them, regardless of the quality of their site, and they do not automatically add to the quality of their site.
No one has ever been able to prove that outgoing links help your site. This myth is a result of conjecture, opinion, and the illogical karmic belief that some webmasters have whereby the Internet is some utopic society where what goes around comes around.
Now, let's find out how the visitors at SEOmoz feel... comments?
If you don't link out, nobody links in, it's that easy. To amplify your internal linkage, you need foreign inbound links. To make a page part of the theme/topic authority spread on the Web, you need to put in closely related outbound links, which attract natural inbounds. Based on your linkage your site interacts with the Web or not. Isolated conglomerates of pages do not rank naturally. Feeding them with bought links assigns them an orphan status, not an authority status. Search engines consider how a page/site is embedded in topical networks. Their link analysis weights inbound and outbound links to determine (topical) popularity, relevancy, and authority. The lack of themed outgoing links (PR hoarding) is a negative ranking factor. A high amount of unrelated outbounds (and/or artificial links) is a negative ranking factor. Well done topical linkage OTOH is a positive ranking factor. So yes, properly deployed outgoing links do improve organic rankings, directly and indirectly.
In my opinion linking to some quality web sites with conextual links or reference links at the bottom of the page, is very important for both users and search engines. For example lets think a usability expert's web site. Would not be of great value to the users to provide links to useful resources, such as academic papers and usability studies.
An old post of yours, but I couldn't help myself on replying at this point:
of course, you're right, and user 'Aspen' isn't.
A simple test case to prove your point (2009-nov-07) is as follows:
(Note: Pagina.nl is an authorative and old manually built web index with thousands of daughter-categories, each with roughly the same PR.)
1) For the search query https://www.google.nl/search?q=training&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rlz=1R1GGGL_nl___NL329&client=firefox-a , the no.1 SERP is training.pagina.nl.
2) For the search query https://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rlz=1R1GGGL_nl___NL329&hs=Erw&num=100&q=webdesign&btnG=Zoeken&meta=, the URL webdesign.pagina.nl (an equally popular and competitive daughter-category of Pagina.nl doesn't rank within the first 100 results.
Core (and sole?) reason for this difference: training.pagina.nl outlinks to 'directly-training-related' company websites, while webdesign.pagina.nl mostly outlinks to 'indirectly-webdesign-related' company websites.
Case closed, next ;)
Is it time to rethink this post?
I have frequently gotten SERP boosts by adding links to relevant pages as a reading list at the close of some articles. Sometimes these links hit other pages on my own site and sometimes they hit other sites with good info on the topic.
This can easily be tested by anyone who does not believe.
There is absolutely no question outbound links help. If you engage in any buying and selling of text link advertising you'll see the value pretty quickly.
Your SEO efforts may not turn on the outgoing links (as opposed to the incoming links) but it can defiantly help establish a site as knowledgeable in a field, not to mention becoming a hub and/or an authority.
If linking to bad sites constitutes bad neighborhood, won't linking to good ones constitutes good neighborhood?
If linking to bad neighborhood can completely delist / severly penalize your site by G, shouldn't linking to good neighborhood help it in the G SERPs?
I DO believe that relevant outbound links to quality sites on your own can be more valuable than most things people go for. For example; Meta tags, Alt attributes, file names etc.
;-)
i agree with aspen