How many outbound links shoud I allow?

% growth? % of IBL? any experiences out there?

[holidayrentals]

I have heard on the SEO grapevine that outbound links help your site aswell. And to be fair we are doing quite well to date. We do all the usual stuff, on and offsite, and still link exchange etc etc!

But we are looking to allow all of our customers to have links from their content on our site out to their personal sites. Obviously normal quality guidelines will be in place (legal, decent, honest, safe!, ontopic, working etc) but does anyone have any experiences on too many outbound links.

Either in terms of absolute numbers, percentage of inbound or % growth rates.

If anyone has any practical experience I would love to discuss it here.

Many thanks in advance.
Adrian

[cnvi]

I have heard on the SEO grapevine that outbound links help your site aswell

Outbound links to quality and relevant sites that benefit your end users experience show the search engines that you are linking for the end user. SE's also realize you cannot always control who links to you - but SEs know you can control who you link out to.

Anytime we launch a new site, we link out to other sites relevant to our own. This has a multitude of benefits. It first shows the SEs that we are linking for the end user. Sites that we link to sometimes link back. And the links themselves help our end users learn more about our product or service.

Outbound links also show webmasters that you are open to linking - webmasters will link to your site in hopes that you will link to them. This produces those one way links that everyone wants. You can then decide if you will reciprocate those links.

How many outbound links shoud I allow?

Keep the volume realistic (dont publish hundreds or thousands of links on the same day). And make sure you are only linking to sites that are quality resources that help your own users learn more about the product/service/information that your site offers.

[austtr]

Stop thinking about "the site" think about pages instead. Each page has a topic.

Our experience is that 2 or 3 outbound links from a page to the authority sites for its topic seems to work quite well.

The importance of outbound links is not new, the subject has been around for years and advice has been freely available to anyone willing to read.

The concept is probably totally foreign to those who embrace PR hoarding, but those who design pages with the viewer mind should have no problems with it.