What are Outbound Links?
These are links from your pages that direct to other sites and offer extra value or authoritative citations for your audience. Outbound links, if strategically used, benefit the overall user satisfaction by pointing users to important information and enhancing topical relevance from a search engine’s point of view. An abundant outbound links approach tends to counter the credibility of a site, and pointing to low-quality domains harms domain authority. On the other hand, strategic link placement enhances content value and promotes inter-site friendship. Monitoring clicks on outbound links offers additional insights into user interests apart from one’s content.
Some examples of outbound links are: Linking to articles hosted on other domains, referencing documents published on partner sites, and directing readers to government pages for core data.
Related terms: anchor text, referral traffic, link equity, external link