How important is outbound links (OBL) for SEO?

[rohan941]

I've heard of people saying that too many OBL can interfere with the link juice and you can not have over 100 OBL, is this true?

 

[SEOPub]

The power that a page can pass on to another page is split up among all the links on the page (not evenly, but split up).

The more links that are on a page the weaker each link is on that page.

 

[rohan941]

Ok thanks for your reply it was really helpful.

 

[Miguelito203]

I've heard of people saying that too many OBL can interfere with the link juice and you can not have over 100 OBL, is this true?

Too many links is not a good thing -- especially from spam sites. It's also important to note that links are not treated equally, so you have to go for quality over quantity. It's better to have a few high-quality links than a bunch of links for sites that are just okay. If you're doing your job right, your site will start to get quality outbound links naturally.

Joey

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

That has nothing to do with the question.

 

[samimnoorzaitgc]

You should click the "Thanks" button under a post instead of saying thanks in another post. This gives the poster credits, don't you see "Thanked x times in x posts"?

 

[samimnoorzaitgc]

And for your question:
Each Out-bound link means that you are traveling from a certain webpage to another. These links decrease your page's ranking. You should add a No-Follow tag on your link that will reduce the affection of an outbounding link.
<a href=”http://www.example.com” rel=”nofollow”> Goto Website</a>
the nofollow tag tells that you don't want it to be counted as a real link, and so this way you won't lose ranking.

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

Everything about this statement is wrong.

There is no credible evidence that increasing the number of outbound links on a page decreases that pages ranking. Sites like Wikipedia, which often have 150-200 outbound links on a page, would be screwed.

Second, adding a nofollow tag does not conserve link juice on a page. The authority that a page can pass on through its links still flows through that link. It just flows into a black hole and is lost instead of being transferred to the page that is being linked to.

Google changed how they handled nofollow links around 2009 to combat PageRank sculpting. People were trying to use nofollow to make other links on their pages more powerful. There are still ways to do that, but it doesn't involve nofollow.

 

[rohan941]

rohan941

So does this means that nofollow links still pass on some sort of authority?

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

No it does not mean that at all.

This diagram is about the best explanation of how nofollow impacts other links on the same page. This was a change made back in 2009.

 

[samimnoorzaitgc]

Let me ask SEOPub: Why do forums make our signatures NoFollow? Do they lose rank? Or to just force us to pay for a premium account?

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

They make external links nofollow to discourage spammers from using their forum as a playground.