Although it takes less than 15 seconds to create an outbound link, some people will spend quite a bit more time agonizing over the ramifications. Now, Google’s issued a blog post about outbound links, and the company’s official stance amounts to “relax.”
Honestly, this information is likely to be old news to a lot of you, and common sense to others. Refresher courses are fairly popular, though, and in the interest of also helping newbies and worrywarts, we’ll push on.
Maile Ohye, a developer programs tech lead, noted on the Webmaster Central Blog, “Relevant outbound links can help your visitors. . . . Thoughtful outbound links can help your credibility.” She stated that you shouldn’t worry about a site’s PageRank when linking to it, and that linking out doesn’t lead to losing your visitors forever.
Here’s what may be a less familiar tip from Ohye, too: “Descriptive anchor text (the visible text in a hyperlink) helps accurately inter-connect the web. It allows both users and Googlebot to better understand what they’re likely to find when following a link to another page. So if it’s not too much trouble, try making anchor text descriptive.”
As for some no-nos, don’t use more than 100 links per page. Nofollow outbound links that have been sold. And be careful that comment spam doesn’t ruin all your careful rule-following.
Easy enough, right? So go, link as you see fit, and try not to let the process cause any ulcers.
