Outbound links and SEO

[Andy]

Does anyone do one-way outbound linking to relevant sites to improve their search engine results?

In blogging circles it's called "link love".

On one of my pages I did it along time ago. It didn't seem right at the time from what I learn't about page rank algorithms but this page has made me good consistent money from sponsored text link ads.

I am starting to apply this technique to new sites on the home page.

What I do is take a list of my key phrases. I take the top 5/6 2 word phrases. Then I search for the top listed sites in Google for each phrase. Then I link to one of the top sites with the keyphrase in the anchor text and use their headline as a description tag.

It's like you are on the bottom rung of the ladder and getting those at the top to suck you up towards them.

I hope my theory works for the other sites. It works well for search engines who link out alot 

[Hope]

Since the internet is nothing but a bunch of websites linked to one another, it is ony logical that outbound linking is going to help you. It helps the user experience and as far as I know, you get ranking benefits from it still.

[Andy]

I think it's well worth trying this strategy if you have a low traffic site since there is nothing to lose. Of course you want to make sure you have a majority of your  own original content on the site first so the links are not diluting the content much.

You can use the target="_blank" tag in your html links if you really want people to stay on your site. It's just a gamble as to how search engines view this practise. Within articles, it seems like this approach is best.

Linking to blogs/forums is preferable to ecommerce sites since they are far more likely to thank you and link back in a post.

[Andy]

Hey Heidi (what a great name to have  ),

can you share some of the innermost seo secrets of out-bound linking? Is my method good or should we only link to our friends etc. ?

[Hope]

Outbound linking is effective if the links go to sites that are relevant to the sites you are linking to. Keep in mind that you are giving a hand to who ever you link to.

You should always put relavant keywords in your link text. If you are using an image, then use a title attribute to the link.

[Andy]

So it is better to partner with others that you link up with rather than giving them a one-way advantage?

[Hope]

Yes it is better, but outbound only links help you as well.

[indu]

Hi
Outbound links are important on your web pages.  Black Hat SEO typically tries to generate dozens of inbound links and sprinkle all of them around, but what this achieves is that you need to constantly add increasingly of these in order to hold rank, against others exploiting the same tactic, and Search Engines can probably figure out that you are stuffing the ballot box.
Thanks...

[joe12joe]

So it is better to partner with others that you link up with rather than giving them a one-way advantage?

I think this strategy is also known has link farming and it is considered to be a black hat technique and it is strongly discouraged by Google. Lately, they have been trying to hunt down those websites doing it. I feel, if you would build your outbound links in a way that it would be natural, it would add a value towards your page rank. For example: forum posting, article posting etc. But  link exchange just for links is not a good idea.