Search Engine Marketing Articles

"Does outbound linking hurt your search engine ranking?"
14 June 2006

Our internet marketing and SEO clients often ask; "Will outbound linking affect my rankings in Google?" There's no simple yes or no answer, and we've chosen a few situations where your rankings can be hurt, or improved depending on your motive for outward linking, and the nature of the sites you are linking into.

Affiliate Sites:
Affiliate sites are defined as sites with no real content of their own, instead being a collection of banners and links.

Much of their content is usually hot-linked to other sites with a clickable graphic with a url containing code that will be used to identify the site where the click came from, and rewarding the site either by the number of visitors they send, or by a percentage of any traffic they send that converts into sales.

Affiliate sites are almost exclusively made of outbound links in one form or another. People can make good money from affiliate sites, but they shouldn't expect much in the way of search engine traffic from them, especially from Yahoo and Google.

It's well-known that it's difficult to rank affiliate sites, the reason being that search engines would rather send their users directly to the original content, rather than to a page of links. They will usually penalise or even remove the worst, spammy affiliate sites from their index.

The period for any penalty or index removal varies between 3 months and 3 days, depending on the search engine. Don't put up zero content pages of outbound links if you care about your site!

Reciprocal Links Pages:
Most sites doing search engine optimisation will exchange links with partners to try and improve both of their rankings.

Since Google's algorithm update of November 2005, nicknamed Jagger, many sites relying heavily on reciprocal link exchanges to boost their link popularity or Page Rank, suddenly found themselves ranking poorly. It was quickly established that the worst affected sites had reciprocal links pages full of links to completely off-topic, non-relevant websites.

It appeared that Google were discounting links from sites to partners whose sites were on a non-related topic. Other sites with tightly focussed reciprocal links pages weren't hit by Jagger though. By all means, you can look for partners to exchange links with, but if you want to keep your rankings in Google, you should find web sites that are closely related to your topic. In other words, if you run a software site, you probably shouldn't expect to improve your rankings by exchange linking with a site selling Viagra!

The other danger with reciprocal linking is that you can later find yourself penalised if a site you agree to link to, somehow becomes banned in a search engine.

Linking to Banned Sites:
Excessively linking to banned sites will eventually lead to a penalty or complete ban. Many websites in the gambling, pills and pornography markets will use shady methods that will get them banned eventually and our opinion is that you shouldn't link to them. Other sites that look reputable when you agree to exchange links, may later try to take short cuts that will get them banned.

Remember a link to a site is vote for that site in the eyes of the search engines. If you link into a bad neighbourhood, you'll likely lose some of your own reputation in the eyes of Google, and your rankings could be affected. Don't panic though. A couple of links here and there to banned sites shouldn't hurt too much, but there are no hard and fast rules. Periodically check your outbound links. Firstly, make sure that they still work (link integrity is important), and secondly make sure that the sites you are linking to have Page Rank on the Google toolbar, and are still indexed in Google.

Linking out to Great Sites:
We have an example for you of a site that contains hundreds of outbound links yet ranks very highly in Google for a very competitive term; "freeware utilities". The site is called "The Great Software List" and we've no doubt when you open it and look around, you'll add it to your bookmarks, send an email to your friends and put up a link to it from your website too! This is a site run by a webmaster who has collected all the best PC freeware utilities and sorted them into categories such as image editing, file handling etc.

He's reviewed each utility, and put up a link to the homepage for each one. I can tell you, this guy has done very little to his optimise his site for the search engines, and he's certainly not worried about Page Rank leakage. He's carefully assembled a catalogue of freeware software with links and descriptions; and created an invaluable resource! This has had two consequences. Firstly, he's gained natural links from people like myself, achieving a Page Rank of 6 and high rankings without doing any SEO at all. He's created the content and his fans, like me, have done the SEO work for him by linking to the site.

Secondly, he's inadvertently created a "hub". A hub is a site with quality content and links to the best, relevant sites on a given subject. Hubs are considered especially valuable by the search engines because they understand that a human-edited hub is bound to have something to offer a user doing a search for "freeware utilities". This is a good example of a site that has boosted its rankings by freely adding outbound links to other quality content pages.

Outbound linking Summary:
Linking out to other sites can either hurt you or improve your rankings in the search engines. Excessive outbound, affiliate-linking will doubtlessly harm your rankings, but we've also seen a so-called hub site with many outbound links, ranking very well for a difficult keyword without any evidence of intentional optimisation. What's the difference between the two types of sites? In our view, the differences between the two types of sites are intent, and content.

As we said at the beginning, an affiliate site is just a page of outbound links, and the intention is to make money fast. A hub site however is a collection of specialist hand-written content with links to carefully selected websites. Be wary about linking to other sites though, and check your outbound links regularly. A final word; don't link hoard! Links are what made the web what it is today. Any website with a significant amount of content will have a link somewhere to a friend's homepage or some other recommended site. Any sizeable site without any links at all could raise a flag in the eyes of the more sophisticated search engines.

If you have any questions about outbound linking, or would like a site review if you suspect your site is penalised for outbound linking, you are welcome to join our search engine marketing forum and ask there. Please note that this article contains our opinions based on what we are seeing at the present time. Think carefully before you decide to act on them, and as with any SEO advice you come across on the internet, try to verify them elsewhere if you can.