I've heard it's not good for SEO to have many outgoing links on my site. I wonder if it is true and if so, why is it not SEO-friendly? Rep+ will be added for each helpful explanation.
You loose a little page rank for each link from your site to another site. This is same way for sites that link to your site. The more links from your site to other sites the less for your own site.
I found the following link very useful when I first started looking at PageRank analysis: http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank_calculator.php Something to note is that as your PR increases, the effect of linking out to related sites will have less impact on your PR. Also, as your site increases in PR, try to spread PR through your site as sub-pages with high PR and targetted content are useful in bringing traffic to your site.
I have heard that having high quality relevant outbound links at the end of an article can actually help you in the SERPs - but if you are a link farm with no content I think clearly the outbound links will hurt you
I agree, the sites you link to have an impact on the reputation of your site. Who are you recommending?
Whilst you can lose "page rank" that is only one small factor in the SERPs. Otherwise PR5 would always be above a PR4 and that is just not the case. The search engines are interested in relevancy, if you have a page on "Kit Kats" and link to another site's pages about "Kit Kats" then you are increasing the usefulness of your page for the visitor. Also link to similar pages within your own site (say, Mars Bars and Yorkees) and as I've said provide good external links to more "Kit Kats" stuff and the search engines will see the relevancy of you page in the web, will be able to better classify your internal pages and will start to see what "authority" you have on a subject. As for "too many outgoing links", the actual numbers as to what is too many, are impossible to generally define - see which pages rank highly for a given key phrase and see what those sites do linking wise, if they give lots of links then you need to follow suit. Lastly linking out makes sense as part of a link building campaign! COnsider this - if you publish ten links on "kit kats" and someone else wants to write about kit kats, they'll find your page and link to you as you've already done a chunk of the work. (Right, now I want some bloody chocolate.)
I believe if the link is good for your website's vistitors it will also be good for the search engines. You need good content first and the links must go to relevant, useful websites.
Completely agree. A blanket rule like "Outbound links hurt SEO" is as invalid as "All Inbound links help SEO". Relevance and usability are the keys. If SE's think that your article is relevant and the links that you placed in it go hand-in-hand with the rest of your content, then you get more cred. Of course, this does depend on the sites that you're linking to as well, so writing copy about link spamming and then linking to the link spammers probably won't win you any points. Having 50 links in one article probably isn't a great idea either, but if you think about it, a user isn't going to click on even half of those if they're reading that page, so that's an easy call.
Whether it helps SERPS we don't know for sure, however, I would opt for a slight yes. Does it hurt? Probably not, however, the only way a link can hurt you is if you're linking to a bad place. But seriously now, check the top web sites out there, they do nothing but point visitors to really good (high quality) content on other web site without nofollow attributes. To me, that's what the web and linking is all about--Google knows this too.
Yes, them outgoing links to relevant (and keyword rich) pages can help you rank as well. Sure incoming (inbound) links are certainly overwhelmingly more valuable in getting you the rankings, but not many realize that outgoing (outbound) links can help as well.