How valuable is cross-linking?

Better than just incoming links, all else equal?

[mofahead]

I'm in charge of an established site with lots of inbound links and almost no outbound links. Is there value (in terms of SERPs) in linking to some of the sites that link to mine already?

[secretceleb]

its always getting as many links as possible on your subject area and featuring them as outbound links when your users are losing interest at the bottom of the page or the side-bar somewhere conspicuos they can click on these links and go somewhere else.
outbound links do make a difference, if you have none google assumes your site is not worth linking from and downscores you on your keywords.
what kind of site is it?

[mofahead]

Thanks for the response. It's the website for an Oriental rug store. We have a collection of articles on rugs, and you can search our stock online.

I guess it's a bit hard to believe that google penalizes you for not linking out of your site. after all, some of the most popular sites on the web don't have links pages. But they do have a ton of inbound links.

[tedster]

Don't think of it as a "penalty" or a negative -- it isn't. It's just one missed opportunity for a positive. There are many positive signals your site can send to a search engine, and outbound links are but one possibility.

[mofahead]

So is it safe to say that outbound links have benefits that exceed their cost (in terms of leaking Page Rank)?

[secretceleb]

it depends what kind of rugs they are.

rare rugs such as kalem, cashmeer or rare kurdish rugs, a magic rug as your meta keyword may possibly draw attention from true content and worth of your rugs.

is this something you want?

[Martin Galloway]

mofahead:-
"So is it safe to say that outbound links have benefits that exceed their cost (in terms of leaking Page Rank)? "
________________________

Interesting! I had a chap tell me that my thousands of outbound links would be detrimental to my PR.

I have four sites, in the sightseeing directory I have a total of 7500 outbound links to UK places. This is useful information to folks - yet I was told it will harm my rankings.... wha?

Wikipedia has over 1.2 million articles with at least 10-20 external links per page. So are we to believe that linking to other sites is a bad thing? Perhaps the engines should remind themselves what the definition of "Internet" really means. Collective sharing on the largest network in the World... now linking is a bad thing? Sheesh, next they will be saying driving cars is bad for the atmosphere!

I'd be interested in learning what the benefits are.

Thank you.

Martin.

[CainIV]

My expereince is there is no problems at all with linking out, and that linking to high quality websites is a great idea, from a user standpoint and possible ranking standpoint.

I link openly from many pages in our site, and have never seen detrimental results from it.

[Powdork]

Look for quality sites to link to where the link will make your site more useful, regardless of whether they link back to you or not.