What is an outbound link?

An outbound link is actually pretty easy to understand. It’s simply a link on your website to another website. It’s also called an external link. Rather than linking to something on your own website—an internal link or an inbound link—you send someone away from your website.

Are outbound links controversial?

In short, yes, outbound links are considered controversial by some. There is a common misconception that it’s bad to place external links on your website because they send your website traffic elsewhere. Additionally, you can’t control what’s on that other website, so why would you send your potential customers and website visitors elsewhere? Taking these misconceptions as truth is not only incorrect, but it can actually negatively affect your website.

Outbound links are an important part of your SEO strategy, not something to be avoided. They can help your SEO efforts in twofold: by building trust and improving organic traffic.

How can outbound links improve my rankings?

As long as you’re linking to high-quality content, outbound linking can only help you. Not only does it help your audience learn to trust you because you are backing up your information with relevant studies and research, but it can also help you build partnerships with other companies. Think of outbound linking like citing your sources when you’re writing a research paper. You build authority this way. 

Outbound linking also teaches search engines about valuable content and can boost your organic traffic. When you link to a topic that is closely related to the content on your website, it helps search engines learn what your page is about. You can think of it as strengthening the page’s signal.

While outbound linking will help improve your page rankings, it’s still important to have other SEO strategies in place, like a link building plan.