Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How many outbound links is too many outbound links?
-
As a part of our SEO strategy, we have been focusing on writing several high quality articles with unique content. In these articles we regularly link to other websites when they are high quality, authoritative sites. Typically, the articles are 500 words or more and have 3-5 outbound links, but in some cases there are as many as 7 or 8 outbound links.
Before we get too carried away with outbound links, I wanted to get some opinions on how many outbound links we should be trying to include and more information on how the outbound links work. Do they pass our website's authority on to the other website? Could our current linking strategy cause future SEO problems? Finally, do you have any suggestions for guidelines we should be using?
Thank you for your help!
-
Very helpful answer thanks (even though it wasn;t me who asked the question!). If a forum allows lots of low quality dofollow backlinks, e.g. in signatures, would they be penalised?
-
There is no set amount of outbound links that are the "right" amount. Just use common sense and don't be spammy about it.
Linking to other sites does pass some link value to their sites, so make sure that they are high quality sites. Linking to low quality sites can get you penalized. On the flip side, linking to high authority sites is believed to give your site a slight boost.
-
You are leaking your PR to these other websites, and if not opening in a new window, you're increasing your bounce rate and lowering the time spent on your site.
7 to 8 outbound links on an article is a tremendous drain of your internal PR and could also send Google the false signal that you are selling links since they are dofollow.
I would remove outgoing links, if you need them as references then nofollow them and target="_blank" them. You are still losing some PR with nofollowing them, but Google can read them and still see that you are linking to them if that is your intention. I would allow Google, FB links for example to be dofollow, but would no follow lesser known sites.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should an internal link open in a new tab or in the same window?
Should an internal link open in a new tab or in the same window? Seems like this is an issue that has never had a definitive answer one way or the other. But I couldn't find any recent articles from reliable sources taking a stance and answering this question. Does anyone know if user engagement metrics (time on site, bounce rate, pages per visit) are impacted if a user clicks a link that opens in a new tab? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | NicheSocial0 -
Google Webmaster Guideline Change: Human-Readable list of links
In the revised webmaster guidelines, google says "[...] Provide a sitemap file with links that point to the important pages on your site. Also provide a page with a human-readable list of links to these pages (sometimes called a site index or site map page)." (Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en) I guess what they mean by this is something like this: http://www.ziolko.de/sitemap.html Still, I wonder why they say that. Just to ensure that every page on a site is linked and consequently findable by humans (and crawlers - but isn't the XML sitemap for those and gives even better information)? Should not a good navigation already lead to every page? What is the benefit of a link-list-page, assuming you have an XML sitemap? For a big site, a link-list is bound to look somewhat cluttered and its usefulness is outclassed by a good navigation, which I assume as a given. Or isn't it? TL;DR: Can anybody tell me what exactly is the benefit of a human-readable list of all links? Regards, Nico
On-Page Optimization | | netzkern_AG0 -
Duplicate anchor text vs poor relevance in internal links
We're writing a number of blog posts, all based around a particular head-term (call it "women's widgets"). Each post will be centered around a different long-tail keyword (e.g. "women's brandA widgets", "women's brandB widgets", "women's type1 widgets", etc.). We want to link from the blog posts back to the main "women's widgets" category-level page on our site. Should we: a) Use the words "women's widgets" in each blog post and link that to the "women's widgets" page? This would be the most relevant, but it also seems like using the same anchor text on all of the posts, and linking to the main page, is not good since Google doesn't like seeing the same exact anchor text all the time, right? b) Link the long-tail keyword ("women's brandA widgets") to the main "women's widgets" page? That would solve the anchor text duplication issue, but then the anchor text doesn't seem relevant to the page being linked to (it might never mention "brandA" on that main page at all), and I think it would also hurt the blog post's chances of ranking for the long-tail keyword since we're basically saying that there's a more relevant page for that keyword somewhere else (i.e. you shouldn't link out from a page using the phrase you're trying to optimize that page for). c) Link a nearby word/phrase instead? For example, we could say "Trust Companyname.com for your women's widget needs", and link "Companyname.com" to the "women's widget" page. By proximity to the keyword phrase, that may help a bit, but again the relevancy of the anchor text to the page being linked to is fairly low. I'd hate to have a bunch of "click here", "read this" or "company name" anchor texts being used, just in the name of not overusing the head-term in the anchor text. Are we just missing something, or misunderstanding Google's preferences? What do you do when you don't want to overuse a keyword in anchor text, but you still want to link to a main category-level page using the head-term in order to tell Google that that is the most relevant, best page for that keyword? Is anchor text duplication more of a problem for external backlinks, and less of an issue for internal interlinking? Do you have a different suggestion, other than what I outlined above? Thanks for the help!
On-Page Optimization | | BandLeader
John0 -
Is a Mega Menu with over 300 links in it hurting my rankings?
I got hit pretty badly by Panda 4.0 (1/3 of my traffic lost), and I'm fairly certain it was because Google had potentially indexed over 20 million pages from a site filtering piece of software and got done for duplicate content. I have since fixed that using URL Parameters and that 20 million is down to 2.7 million now and I have submitted a clean site map, so now I wait. I have just done a site relaunch and am trying to determine if there are any other issues. I run an online store, and I have a mega menu with well over 300 links in it - makes the user experience really quick and easy to jump exactly where you want - and then I have about 30 links in the footer. I know there's a 'no more than 100 links on a page' guideline for Moz, but does anyone know if Google is smart enough to see the same header / footer navigation structure on every page of a site and know it's navigation and not water down the rest of the links, or do I need to re-think and simplify my navigation? It's one of those things that's there for a user experience and now I'm worried that I'm being penalised. The site is www dot shopnaturally dot com dot au
On-Page Optimization | | sparrowdog0 -
Best way to nofollow affiliate links?
I don't "nofollow" affiliate links but I have quite a few. Doing them one by one would just be an impossible job. Would it be best to get a plugin that nofollows EVERYTHING? What would google prefer? I need to DOFOLLOW some links because those sites deserve it.
On-Page Optimization | | 2bloggers0 -
What is the best setup for conical Links
Should I have the conical link state: 1. www.autoinsurancefremontca.com 2. www.autoinsurancefremontca.com/index.html 3. autoinsurancefremontca.com Also do you need a conical link on each page if you have more than one page on your site?
On-Page Optimization | | Greenpeak0 -
Prevent link juice to flow on low-value pages
Hello there! Most of the websites have links to low-value pages in their main navigation (header or footer)... thus, available through every other pages. I especially think about "Conditions of Use" or "Privacy Notice" pages, which have no value for SEO. What I would like, is to prevent link juice to flow into those pages... but still keep the links for visitors. What is the best way to achieve this? Put a rel="nofollow" attribute on those links? Put a "robots" meta tag containing "noindex,nofollow" on those pages? Put a "Disallow" for those pages in a "robots.txt" file? Use efficient Javascript links? (that crawlers won't be able to follow)
On-Page Optimization | | jonigunneweg0 -
SEO value of "in the news" links on home page?
Notice more sites have an "in the News" section on the home page, or something similar like press releases... Apart from providing users fresh content, is there an SEO value to this? What is the explanation for this? Have a feeling the answer is obvious but just not too sure Thanks a lot.
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja0