Whilst working on optimizing our website content and incoming links, the importance of outbound links is often overlooked. However, I’ve reason to believe that the quantity and quality outbound links are one of the factors used in search engine ranking algorithm. Let me illustrate this with my own experience.

My own experience with outbound links

Having conquered search engine optimization for several niche keywords (with low traffic volume), I turned to something more challenging. I wanted to search engine optimize one of my blogs for a keyword that had greater competition and a higher traffic volume.

As this blog was initially created out of personal interest, no SEO techniques were used on the existing content. Thus, the first thing I did was to optimize the content using the techniques highlighted in Building a Niche Blog for Top Search Engine rankings, with the exception of incorporating outgoing links.

Doing this alone did not give me a wholesome improvement to my Google search engine ranking. My ranking improved from between 101 and 110, to between 71 and 80.

What happens when you ignore your outbound links?

Next, I started building incoming links using the techniques in 5 steps to get top search engine rankings. As this had worked tremendously well in optimizing my other niche blogs, I was utterly shocked when my ranking dropped to between 110 and 120 the very next day. What went wrong?

I soon realized that this was because the outbound links in my blog were minimal. As the number of incoming links increased without an increase in outgoing links, my blog was somewhat penalized for being “selfish”.

Once I placed several outgoing links to some sites with significant Page Ranks, my niche blog is now ranked between 31 and 40. While this is by no means my final ranking objective, I think I have made significant progress within just a two week period. Let’s see when I can get this niche blog ranked on first page!

For more information on How to use outbound links for Search Engine Optimization, read my upcoming post on http://www.semhints.com.

Here are some interesting
blog posts on Outbound Links:

Do outbound links matter for SEO? by Problogger
How Bad Outbounds Can Impact Websites by SEOmoz
SEO for Google Boost
Your StumbleUpon Traffic with Outbound Links by Caroline Middlebrook