Does outbound links matter in SEO?
Learn how outbound links can boost your SEO by enhancing credibility and user experience. Discover best practices for effective linking.
When you write your product description or blog, it is recommended to include outbound links to content where possible. Here when we mention outbound links, we mean Internal links and External links. But it is recommended to include, but not to spam these links while it is not related.
Outbound links? What are they?
As we mentioned above, there are Internal links, and External links.
Internal links are links that navigate from one page to another page on your website. This internal link can be a link to your Size Chart page, your FAQ page, or your campaign page just like Outrage does to link to your reproductive justice page. Or Allbirds have links to your internal carbon footprint labelling page
External links are links that navigate users to another page from another website which provides users with 3rd party information, and knowledge. Linking to reputable, high-quality sources can help establish your content as a valuable resource. When you provide well-researched information and back it up with credible sources, it can enhance your site's trustworthiness in the eyes of users and search engines.
Internal links vs External links, which matters more?
Internal links
Providing internal links help your content and SEO:
Providing customers with additional information like size chart, manufacturer information, carbon-free commitment, etc. This kind of information will help customers have longer dwell time and reduce the bounce rate, not to mention help your customers with their purchasing decisions.
Help search engines understand the context and structure of your site content so that they will index it better and evaluate your site's credibility.
External links
Providing external links help your content and SEO:
Linking to trusty websites such as reviews on Trustpilot helps increase the trustability of your website.
Especially with blogs, linking to external content shows customers that you spend time researching your content before writing them. Nowadays, this is more important since the AI is creating blog content, but one thing it fails to do is show the sources for the content. Google always appreciates authentic, original content.
Sometimes, linking out to other websites can encourage those sites to link back to you. While not guaranteed, this reciprocal linking can help improve your own site's authority and search rankings.
Some notes
However, there are some notes that you need to pay attention to such as:
Use descriptive anchor text: The anchor text of your outbound links should be descriptive and relevant to the content of the linked page. Do not write like this: "See the Web Performance in Shopify post here". Instead, write "Explore the the Web Performance in Shopify in 2024"
Avoid excessive linking: Just as I mentioned in the first place, do not spam the links why it is not necessary.
Monitor broken links: Make sure that there are no broken links in your content. If the linked content has changed its URL, make sure to update it. You can use Google Search Console report or use our 404 Tracking Tools of Avada SEO Suites.
Link to external sites with high trust: If you are writing to the KB blog, remember to link to the original, first-party, and reputable.
All in all, it matters, right?
Yes, it matters. Especially now when AI content thrives and impacts the originality of the content on the web. People seem to miss out on these links. Forgetting that content for the web is beyond plain text which they got from AI tools.
Last updated
