How much do outgoing links hurt your site?

Hey guys,

I've heard that lots of outgoing links can hurt a websites standing with the search engines.

First of all, is this true?

Second of all, if it is true, can adding ref=nofollow to the links mitigate this problem by stopping the search engines from following the links?

Thanks in advance guys - I appreciate the learning

Barry

 

Depends on who you link to, definately if you are not bothered about passing PR or link popularity add the rel="no follow" tag to outgoing links.

 

Well, the site in question is a blog, and I'm sending links back to other game related sites (like gamespot, IGN) or referring to news blurbs in Yahoo! news and other news sites.

I usually put 1 link in each blog post - usually but not always.

 

I wouldn't use rel="nofollow" in your posts, though if you have a comment system, I would definately use rel="nofollow" for the visitors who post comments. This will help reduce the effectiveness of blog spam.

 

Nathan,

I've actually closed the comments entirely for now, because I've been inundated with blog spam. I'll probably reopen them and do as you suggested though, when I get around to it

Barry

 

Hurt? I've seen cases where it helps(*). My understanding of the current 'theory' is that a few well selected outgoing links helps the SE's determine what your site is about.

(*)On some less competitive rankings, I've seen pages of links rank for keywords based on what seems to me to be linking OUT to pages related to the search term.

 

aslong as your not linking to sites that are in bad-neighbourhoods (such as link farms) or linking to sites that have been banned by google/yahoo etc you will not be punished in anyway.

 

Ok, thats good to know. Thanks for the input.

Barry

 

No it isn't.

 

I think minstrel has posted a thread about Outbound Links. Its a good article about Outbound Links.. Im searching it here in DP buT i have no luck in finding it .

 

Thanks for the feedback guys, just want to make sure I have my information straight (most people here seem to know whats going on, unlike me!)

Barry

 

Well this is not true. It absolutely does effect PR directly. I made a mistake of having a subdomain not link back to me and made it a PR4 where all the rest are PR3 because they were pointing back. outgoing links will effect it.

Personally I think the redirect thing is crap, just don't link then.

 

Huh?

How does what you said prove anything about outgoing links (as opposed to incoming links)? And what the heck does redirection have to do with this thread?

 

You can link to a lot of resources if Google considers them good neighborhood and it actually helps you to link to them. When you do a lot of internal linking, IMO you should be very careful to structure it right and don't make it spammy.

 

I agree some outbound links can help, but the question was 'can it hurt'.

The answer is yes. Yes it can.

 

Was refering to the nofollow so that they didn't lose with outgoing links. IMO it's better to just not link.

 

If the answer is it can hurt, how to solve this problem then? Thanks.

 

Glad to see someone gave the correct answer.

Outgoing links do not hurt your site

unless maybe your site is a link farm

 

As long as they are relevant sites.

 

Well I admittedly know much less than these other guys, and am absolutely not trying to misinform anyone. I understood that when you pass PR you are actually PASSING some PR (meaning you lose some if a one way link). Linking to banned sites is also not a good idea.

Just hearing an absolute 'no' I felt obligated to say this wasn't so. Again I stand corrected and these guys absolutely know more than I. I'm fairly new.