I was wondering how does outgoing links from your site affect your SEO and Serps? Is outgoing links bad for your site? Or good when your doing outgoing links to reputable sites. Anyone of expertises here that can maybe comment.
I have heard that it helps to link to some reputable sites in your niche. It looks unnatural to have no outgoing links at all on a website. I have not seen direct evidence of this though.
If the keywords in the outgoing links match your niche, it can be helpful as it shows that your site is an authority on that niche. Be careful with outbound links though, cause you are just feeding your competition if you don't do it carefully.
If you got no follow, you dont pass pagerank to other site, and some of that pagerank stay's on your page.
So if you get pagerank from linking to someone elses site with a no follow. Then why doesn't everyone do that? Doesn't make much sense.
Going nofollow is selfish. If everyone did nofollow then there would be no point in nofollow because it would completely mess up google and other search engine's ranking system. If you link out then the sites that you link to deserve the link so give it to them. Don't be like twitter, and wikipedia.
Internet is all about linking between resources. So outbound links to reputable sites are fine. Just don't link to your direct competitors (or use some general keywords when doing it).
Outgoing links can hurt you or help you. They hurt you if you link to a bad neighborhood (like link farms). They help you if you link out to sites that are considered by Google as an authority or "core" in a niche. One of the Google patents talks about using a core group of sites in a niche to determine what other sites are authority sites. So any site those "core" sites link to get a lot of respect from Google, which gets passed to the next set of sites when a link is given, then to the next. By putting an outgoing link from your site to the "core" sites you are attempting to enter the group of sites considered authorities by association. Usually all it takes is an outgoing link from your site to the core and then a few incoming links from sites that have a down stream link from the core group to see some serious improvement in the SERPs. Long story even longer, link out to core sites in your niche then try to get some links from other good sites in your niche and you'll find yourself an authority site.
if the out going link is related to your site it can be helpful but make sure you out link to a good reputable site