Can you Improve your Rankings through Outgoing Links?

We spend so much time trying to get people to link to our site, it’s easy to forget about linking out to other sites. However, outgoing links on your site may be able to help your search engine rankings.

Google gives preference to sites they consider an authority on subjects. One way they determine if a site is an authority is by outgoing links. If Google sees a site linking out to many related sites, they see that site a reference or authority on whatever that site (or page) is about. Now there are many other factors that come in to play, but outgoing links is one of them. So, if you link out to other sites, isn’t reasonable to believe Google will give your site a little credit as an authority?

Out going links also gives you more opportunities to get your keywords in links. All of the search engines give more credit for keywords that are in links. So when you’re linking out to related sites, if you use keywords in these links, you’re improving your ranking for these keywords.

There are two things to keep in mind about link out to other sites. One, of course, is that you never want to link to your competitors. Here is a recent example of a few outgoing links I did for a client that specializes in die casting. One of the sites I linked to was the North American Die Casting Association and another was the American Foundry Society. Both sites are informational sites directly related to his business – and keywords – and neither are competitors.

Another thing to remember is that you will be giving away some of your PageRank when you link out. However, if you keep your outgoing links to a minimum, I believe the benefits discussed before out weigh the PageRank loss. So what do you think? Will linking out improve your search engine rankings? Are there reasons to link out that I missed? Or more reasons not to?

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