When you’re trying to grow a website, one of the strongest indicators you can receive is a quality backlink. Yet so many webmasters have a reluctance to using outbound links to other domains, other websites. They feel as though linking out is going to harm them in some way, as if giving readers a route to another site is going to destroy their traffic and kill their conversion rate.
The reality is, linking out to other sites is almost as important as gaining links into your site. It’s not going to hurt you unless you link out to sites serving malware or spam, and even then, you may be able to get away with a link used as an example. It’s only when your site is full of such links, like what happens when you’re hacked, that it becomes a problem. Linking to regular sites, even sites of moderate value? Perfectly acceptable.
Here are a few good reasons to link out from your website.
The Linked Site May Return the Favor
A link to a site is not invisible. You, as a third party, can visit Ubersuggest or another backlink analyzer and find a relatively complete backlink profile for any site. More importantly, the owner of the site can see when you link to them. Will they notice right away? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on whether or not you direct any reasonable traffic their way.
If, for the sake of argument, your target audience is prone to following your links, you can push a decent amount of traffic to a site you link in one of your posts. The owner of the site will surely see the spike in traffic and will investigate. Through their GA4, they will be able to see the referrer for this spike in traffic comes from your site.
Most site owners will then visit the site linking to them, to see the context of the link and traffic. If the traffic is good and the link is legit, the site owner now has a new domain on their radar. They may browse your site for a while, getting a feel for your content. If they find inspiration – or if they decide to write a response piece to the piece you linked to them from – they may create a piece of content on their site that links to you. Even if they don’t right away, they have you in mind for future links.
It Shows Your Users You Aren’t Making Up Information
The Internet is not a vacuum. Your information comes from somewhere. If it’s a case study you’ve performed, you can link to supporting documents. If it’s a case study or a blog post on someone else’s site, you can use outbound links to show your readers where your information is coming from.
That’s really all it is; sourcing your information. In a sense, it’s no different from what you would do writing an academic paper. When you reference information, statistics, or quotes, you should link to the source of those quotes. This is particularly important when you’re trying to broadcast breaking news or a controversial opinion; support with facts is all but essential.
All too many sites earn a bad reputation for never backing up their statements, making their posts little more than rambling without support.
It Positions You as a Member of a Larger Community
When you link to another page to cite their information, it acknowledges that you consider that site to be a valid source of accurate information. Your users can trust that you have a source. If they’re active in the industry, they may know the source themselves and know how reputable it is.
When you link to another page to respond to something they said in a post, you’re striking up a dialogue. This puts you on relatively equal footing with the site in question. If they choose to respond with another post of their own, the dialogue continues, and you gain validation from the event.
The point is, your industry is very likely made up of websites that are at least aware of each other. Often, the best practice is to treat those websites like partners, even if they’re competitors. Antagonism gets you nowhere. Treating these other sites as colleagues and compatriots is a much better practice.
It Pretty Much Can’t Hurt Your Reputation
As mentioned in the opening, some people fear linking to any site that’s anything other than a top-tier authority. The risk of linking to a site of low quality or poor reputation is too great, they think. They would certainly never link to a site that may disappear and be replaced by a dodgy viagra website, gambling site, or parked domain.
Fortunately for webmasters, the occasional link pointing to a bad site is no problem. Google realized that websites come and go all the time. It’s always possible that old, highly valuable links you posted now point to parked domains, from an old rebranding and expired domain or any other reason.
You are given a certain amount of leeway with such links, and even an intentional link – as long as you’re not trying to profit off the spam site – is perfectly fine. The only case where you can earn a negative action from linking out to poor sites is when you post a bunch of dofollow links to malware-infested sites, spam sites, or otherwise poor domains. The only reason this earns you a penalty is that Google considers it a sign of a hacking and wants to protect your readers.
A Note About Domain Authority
When a site links to you, a certain amount of Domain Authority is brought into your site. When you link to another page, internally or externally, some of that Domain Authority flows out to the destination of the link. When you nofollow a link, that link doesn’t pass Domain Authority, but it still causes a loss of Domain Authority on your page.
Since Domain Authority is a beneficial metric, wouldn’t it make sense to avoid linking out, to hoard as much Domain Authority as possible? Unfortunately, Domain Authority is much more complex. When you attempt to hoard it, it leaks away. When you send it out into the world, it comes back.
Linking out earns you more trust from readers and more links coming in to your site, which boosts your own incoming Domain Authority. Meanwhile, avoiding linking out is only going to make your site look standoffish and irritate your users. Attempting to hoard or sculpt Domain Authority does nothing beneficial and can, in fact, hurt your site in the long run.
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