Outbound Links: Why are they Still Important in SEO? (2023)

What is an Outbound Link?

Outbound links or external links are the opposite of backlinks. When your website gets a link from another website, that is called a backlink. On the other hand, when you link any other on your website, that is called an outbound link.

Outbound links send your readers from your website to others’ websites. Like backlinks, outbound links have importance in blogging. A blogger uses outbound links to point to different resources, examples, data, and articles that are valuable for his readers but not available on his blog.

There are two types of outbound links:

• Do-follow
• No-follow

Do-follow link passes link juice from your site to the linked website while no-follow link passes no link juice.

Outbound Link Example

Here is an example of an outbound link from this post.

In the above image, you can see that I have linked the Semrush SEO tool. This is an example of an outbound link.

Importance of Outbound Link in SEO?

Outbound links are one of the best ways people and search engines use to discover new content. Outbound links are important because they can help bloggers to build trust, establish authority, improve content’s relevance with the topic and get backlinks opportunities.

Give Values to the Readers:

“Why should I send people away from my site?”

If this is your concern, then you have to think differently. An authority blog can grow only if you continue delivering values to the readers.

Think of a case, where you need to give any references, but you have not written an article on that topic. So, is it right to deprive your readers of the values or you should link a better resource for your reference?

If you like to grow your blog authority, it’s good to give value to the reader by linking others’ articles. 

Establish Authority

One of the main importance of outbound links is it helps bloggers to build authority and reputation.

Outbound links help to achieve authority when you reference data or studies on your topic from reputed bloggers of your niche.

It’s a way of telling your readers that you work in the same niche and create content as good as the big giants of the industry are creating. Your audience can correlate you with the bloggers of your niche.

It’s helpful in two ways. As you are adding values to readers and you are being related to the top authority bloggers.

Strengthen the Topic Signal

Search engines learn about your site from the links. Outbound links from a site can strengthen the topic signal to Google. It helps the search engine to understand the niche of your blog and the topic of your article.

For example, the niche of your blog is SEO, and you are linking an article on the topic, ‘How to Get Backlinks Fast’, search engine crawlers can easily relate your niche to the linked article.

So, it is also seen that linking to an off-topic article is not a good idea.

Outbound links build relationships

Building relationships is essential in authority blogging. Outbound links help bloggers to build relationships with others. When you link someone’s blog, his blog gets a backlink. Everyone loves to get a good backlink.

When you give someone a backlink, there’s a high chance that he will visit your blog. Or, you can contact them via email or on social media platforms.

For example,

“Hey Debabrata, I have linked your article “Best On-Page SEO Strategy: 12 SEO Factors to Rank on First Position” inside my newly published article. Hope you will like it.

Link: example.com/post-example

Regards,

Your Name

Example.com”

Don’t go forward asking them to share your content. If your content is valuable, then they may share it on their social platforms. But, the main thing that will happen is you will be able to build a relationship with them.

Get social share

If you link someone inside a quality article, there’s a high chance that your post gets a social share. Now, it’s because everyone loves to get mentioned. It’s a win-win situation for both.

But every post doesn’t get social shares. To get more social shares, you can interview the authority bloggers of your niche or write about them in your blog.

Recently my Twitter followers count has increased by a retweet of my post, by the famous Indian blogger Anil Agarwal.

Link Building Opportunity

This is one of the top benefits of outbound links.

By including the related high authority sources of your niche, you are having exposure in your field. This will help you get link-building opportunities.

This process starts from identifying the influencers and brands of your niche.

Now, write quality articles mentioning them.

The next step is to inform them about your article. This can be done in two ways. Firstly, you can contact them via contact form or on social media platforms.

This is the way you inform them about your content. But, don’t ask for backlinks or anything. If upon them and the quality of the article, that they link back your content or not. 

Outbound Links Vs Inbound Links

How to Add Outbound Links in WordPress

While writing an article in WordPress select the text you want to make a link. Then click on the marked sign as follow.

Now add the outbound link. Make sure you checked the boxes, open in a new tab, and set to no-follow,

Best Practices to Use Outbound Link

How to use the outbound links in the right way? Here are some tips on adding outbound links to your blog.

Give Priority to Interlinking

The best thing is to ink your article internally.

Thus, you can get more page views to your blog and the bounce rate will decrease.

But, what if you don’t have your post to link to?

Go for an outbound link. Link to external sources if you don’t have a resource for It. Link a good article or resource that may add value to your readers.

The main goal of blogging is to provide values in any form.

If you don’t have a page to interlink, why do you want to deprive your readers by not linking to an external link?

But, the question is whom to link?

Link to Authority Sites

The best practice is to link authority sites of your niche, roughly speaking, sites of high DA and PA, and are popular in your niche.

It’s easy to find the Domain Authority of a page. Google chrome extensions like SEOquake can help you to find the DA of a page easily. Once you install this extension, you will see search results like this.

The other way of checking the quality of a site is to use the Semrush SEO tool.

This is the tool I’ve been using since day one of my blogging career. You can try Semrush for free.

Linking to the authority sites adds value to your readers and you become a member of the elite family too.

Make Outbound Links Open in New Tabs

Make the outbound link open in new tabs.

This can be done easily in WordPress.

The main purpose is to keep the readers on your page. When someone clicks on your link, make sure the external link opens in another tab keeping your page on the original tab. That’s how you can make sure your site doesn’t get a high bounce rate.

Besides this, opening an external link on the same page may be sometimes annoying. Readers may not like to be redirected to an external link in the middle of an article.

Thus it becomes a win-win situation for you and your readers.

Limit Your Outbound Links

Unnecessary use of outbound links can give your site a bad impact. Readers don’t like too many links in one article.

Make sure the process of linking external links looks natural.

If you really need something to link in order to add value to the readers, don’t think twice, just go for it.

But, don’t add links forcefully. Readers and crawlers, both will not love it.

Audit Your Current Outbound Links and Fix the Broken Ones

You have linked so many external links. But, some of them might not work correctly. It may be because of three major reasons.

• You have misspelled URL
• Linked pages are not working (4XX errors)
• Pages become irrelevant

So, you have to check the outbound links and replace the irrelevant and broken links. I have discussed some tools to make this process smooth.

What is Google Analytics Outbound Link Tracking

Now, I am going to discuss how to track outbound links using Google Analytics. Google Analytics does allow you to get the total number of clicks on external links. You have to make some changes to that.

If you use Google tag manager, it becomes very easy to set up tracking for outbound links. This method doesn’t require you to write any code for every outbound link.

To track outbound links using Google Tag Manager in Google Analytics you need to follow the following tasks.

• Create an auto event variable
• Create a trigger
• Create a tag
• Debugging and validation

The step-by-step process is nicely described by Optimize Smart.

Audit Your Current Outbound Links and Fix the Broken Ones

Let’s draw a scenario that previously you have linked many others’ websites in your content. Now you have to review them if they are still working or worth linking.

It’s hardly possible to check each article manually and remove the errors. To simplify this task, we need tools or plugins.

The target is to audit your current outbound links and fix the broken links.

Here are different ways to audit outbound links properly.

Broken Link Checker:

Broken Link Checker is a free WordPress plugin that automatically detects broken links on your website.

It’s a wonderful tool that will tell you whenever any of your outbound links go broken.

Just install and activate the plugin, then go to “Tools > Broken Links” in your WordPress admin panel to view the report with all of your broken links:

To fix any broken link found by the plugin, hover over the link and choose “Edit URL” as highlighted in the screenshot above. 

This will enable you to edit the link without having to open each individual page:

Ahrefs:

Alternatively, you can use Ahrefs SEO tool to check the broken links of any website

Best Outbound Links Checker Tools

You should complete a site crawl to identify outbound links. So you need a tool or plugin.

If you are a WordPress user, you can use the Broken Link Checker plugin. This is a simple tool to check your outbound link and broken links. It has an easy and user-friendly interface.

If you don’t want to use a plugin or you are not a WordPress user, then Ahrefs SEO tool may be useful to check the outbound links. This is an all-in-one SEO tool you may try.

FAQ on Outbound Links

Over to You

I think this article has solved all your queries on outbound links ( external links).

Although outbound links drive traffic away from your site, it’s still important.

The main goal of blogging is to add value to the readers. As long as you can provide value to the readers, keep adding external links. Just make sure the external links are worthy of sharing.

If you still have doubts, you can contact us on any social media handle @blogwithdeb.