The use of outbound links was originally seen as a nuisance, and people believed that they drained the PageRank score. But, there is a way of doing it that says you should link to high-ranking site, and doing this will allow you to be a leader, and no matter what you do, you’ll want to be seen as one or the other, and outbound links play a role in this.

There are some spam sites that link to other sites since they think the content makes it look normal, but the fact that the links are there may not even play a factor, but it’s the content. Outbound links have been a way to determine what a page is about. When a page links out, it’s going to a different element that tells about what the link is about.  There is some misinterpretation about what these spam sites try to do, especially with the outbound links and the usefulness of them. Outbound links reflect what the page talks about, and you want to make sure that they don’t’ look spammy. There is value in linking out, and there is also value to users for linking out, and this is important to consider when you’re using outbound links for a content strategy. Even if there is no on-page relevance for linking out, you should try to link out especially if you want users to love the web page.

So does linking lead to relevance or rankings? In a sense, yeah it can be good for relevant pages to have this, but you should move that thought away a little bit. Rather than just blandly choosing either a .edu or a .gov page, or whatever you need, you should link to content that is relevant, regardless of if it’s a ranking page or not. 

The biggest motivation for linking out in the first place is because you want to send out a good message to other sites, and this, in turn, will also play a part in your general authority.  If you link out, make sure that it matters. I get it, it brings forth SEO motivation, but if you’re just linking out to any old page, it’s going to look poor on your part.  You should look at the motivation of linking out so that you can explore the subtopics of what it’s about without taking your web page off by discussing this said subtopic. You want to generally balance out each of these different factors, and make sure that it looks right. 

So yes, use links, link out, whatever it is that you need to do, but as always, make sure it’s freaking relevant, because if it isn’t, it’s going to only make you look worse, and it’s going to actually play a factor in the way that you rank. At the bottom of it all, make sure that the content that you have ranks better than it did in the other previous posts as well.