Do You Gain By Linking TO Authority Sites

Should I have links on my site to authorities?

[jretzer]

I've always had links on my blog to large, authority sites, even though there was never any chance of them linking back. It just looked nice.

But now I've got a large blogroll of decent sites (mostly PR 5s and 6s.) and I think I should pare down the list.

But before I do, I'm wondering if I would lose anything by dropping out the authorities. As I said, there was never any chance of them linking back. But does Google give points for having links TO authorities?

[Brett_Tabke]

Many/most think you don't.

I think you do if done appropriately. I think it defines your community/theme placement and helps you to come up under like minded keywords in your space.

[jadebox]

Just to back up what Brett said ... it may not directly lead to better SERP rankings, but designing your site to best benefit your site's visitors (by, for example, providing links to authority sites where appropriate) will encourage more external sites to link to your site which does directly lead to better ranking.

-- Roger

[Wizard]

I think the same what Brett says, and additionally I have noticed some situations where linking to on-topic sites helped in ranking (for a keyphrase used in outbound anchor text, which was the main theme of a site linked to). So I link to authority sites if I can for both reasons - for my users to find more valuable information and for Google to recognize my theme better.

You don't expect junk sites to manually pick the best authority sites for subject and link to them, do you? So good, related outbounds are one more thing indicating you're a quality site.

[Matt Probert]

You don't expect junk sites to manually pick the best authority sites for subject and link to them, do you? So good, related outbounds are one more thing indicating you're a quality site.

My thoughts exactly. We concentrate on providing data for our readers, and quality relevant links to quality sites offering more information on the same subject. Whether or not this helps our SE position is dubious, but we don't care! Our readers are important, first and always!

Matt

[buckworks]

I do a lot of linking out to sites that are strongly on theme whether they're authority sites or not.

In fact, I take considerable pleasure in linking to undiscovered gems instead of just adding more link love to sites that already have lots.

Quality and relevance ... if you get those right, everything else will fall into place.