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I noticed a site ranking 23 for my most important keyword which i believe is pretty competetive, 333,000 results in Google.
The site does not have its own domain name, hosted on a free isp server. It does not have much content in comparison to many sites above and BELOW it.
It shows 38 backward links on G....all of which are internal pages....no outside backward links showing.
What it does have though is a very obvious link from the home page to it's links page that conatins over 200 "on topic links" to related sites.
Also has a PR 5.
My question is, how important are outgoing links?
I always thought they were important but down the list in comparison to incoming links, content etc etc.
What do you guys think?
Has this site got a major boost by providing so many links that are very relevant to the site?
Interested to hear peoples thoughts.
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
one could say that sooner or later linking out will be of relevance.
I would say the link text to outward sites would help in the ranking of the page on which the link is placed.
I would also say its better to have relevant, (re)source like links on each page instead of on one "links" page, better for the visitor and better for ranking.
The question is:
-will a good outgoing anchortext outweigh the loss in PR?
-will you be rewarded for being so generous in some other way?
-can you use this outgoing link to ask (or get unasked) a link back?
I think good outgoing links that are on topic will (or at least should) help your page. My reasoning for this is that it makes your site/page a better resource. Visitors will not only benefit from your content, but will also have access to all the great resources you link to. As far as I can tell this logic appears to be consistent with what google are trying to do. Dead end pages/sites limiting their usefulness.
As for PR leakage, I could speculate to my hearts content but I still think good outgoing links will work, if not now then soon.
This site has come out of no-where and based on all its other factors.....should not be ranked so high.
I feel they work now, not only for the obvious reason of having keywords on the page in anchor text, but because in-context links to credible sites help establish the importance of the site with the outbound links.
Everyone is always talking about Yahoo and other authoritative sites being deemed important and ranking well, and backlinks are nearly always mentioned. Yahoo isn't important because there are loads of links pointing at it, Yahoo is important because of the outbound links. :) The same concept applies to DMOZ. A site can establish itself as authoritative with outbound links.
The importance of outbound links is often overlooked and certainly underestimated. After all the paranoia regarding linking to "bad neighborhoods" and PR0 penalties for linking and crosslinking, it is good to see people talking about linking to other sites again. Forget about PR Leak or whatever the latest PRanoia is and link to informative sites freely. The results may suprise you.
I've been deleting ALL emails that even mention PR regarding link requests. ;)
One word may perhaps link to a page on my own website or elsewhere that brings a definition of that word. Or I may link from a phrase, that fits very well with the page that I link to.
WWW lives by links. One might even say: WWW _is_ links. Almost all my pages contain in-text-links. It doesn't really matter if theese links lead to another page on the same website, a page on another of my websites or a page on the website of somebody else. What matters is the relevance and quality of the page that a link leads to.
If I make good and relevant links and if I tell my visitors what theese links are about, then I help my visitors. A page with good and relevant links will in most cases be a better page than if it did not have those links. (Though on the other hand too many links may be confusing and disturbing.) A competent policy of outgoing links should therefore be rewarded by search engines.
A rather special feature with my websites are the mottos. Lots of my articles have mottos. I do it this way: At the top right corner I have the word "motto". This word is a link to the motto page for that article. The motto is a quotation from somebody. Some mottos consist of 2 (3,4,5....) quotations. Of course I credit the authors of theese quotations, and if there is a good website I link to it and use the author's name as link text.
Some of my motto pages are on page 1 for searches on the name of an author. I get quite a few visits to them and send visitors to good websites or single pages about authors. Doing this I am actually gaining some kind of authority in questions concerning authors. This may be the explanation of my rather surprising succes with gaining PR on some motto pages at this latest update.
Rather, I think that Google would go more on the relevance and importance (PR) of the sites you're linking to, since that's less open to deception (eg having "widgets" in the anchor text pointing to a site that's about "gewgaws".
I think there's a strong case for putting such links on your index page. The sites in the top 3 spots for my main keyword have from 7 to 14 links to other sites (including subdomains). I added six relevant links to my index page last time round and got to the foot of the first page. I've added a few more for the next update.
Anne
There's no "PR leakage" from linking to other sites, except to the degree that you're diluting the PR that you send to your other pages via internal links.
The first consideration shouldn've be whether Google assigns value to the link or not, but whether the link adds value for the surfer.
Most sites use links ineffectively, or incorrectly. "Our Reciprocal Link Page" is an example of how not to use links effectively. Devoting several pages of a site to CSS techniques then linking to W3C's CSS pages with in-context links using "Click Here For More" as anchor text is an example of how to use ineffective link text. Links with no descriptive text are another example and I see all of those ineffective methods used frequently.
In-context links with keywords in anchors are effective. :)
