Are outgoing links useful for the donor site?

To answer once and for all about the impact of outgoing links (on the donor site itself that links out), I want to briefly describe the essence of one interesting SEO study from the Reboot Online expert team. Looking ahead, I will answer the most impatient – outgoing links have a positive effect on the site that placed them.

To test the impact of outgoing links on rankings and, accordingly, site positions in perfect conditions, the guys came up with a new type of cosmetics with a fictitious (fictitious) name “Phylandocic” and a test synonymous word “Ancludixis”. We chose the words so that there would be no results in the SERP search results of Google.

They then created 10 new cosmetics sites, 300 words each. Randomly selected 5 sites out of those 10 and put links to external sites.

Sites to which outbound links were placed:

• Oxford University – http://www.ox.ac.uk/
• University of Cambridge – https://www.cam.ac.uk/
• State website http://www.genome.gov/19516567

After 5 months, it was found that, in general, all sites that had outgoing links had better positions in Google search results.

The outgoing links experiment was well thought out.

I don’t want you to drown in the details of which I was in the process of all the research with outgoing links, so I’ll just give a few that seem interesting to me.

To exclude possible external influence on the results of the experiment, the researchers:

• Strictly limited the circle of people who knew about the experiment.
• All actions were performed in incognito mode.
• Didn’t check the results in Google search directly during the experiment.
• Reduced to the required minimum visits to sites and search for key phrases.
• Opened sites for indexing in a zig-zag pattern.

The outgoing links experiment gives us clear outcomes

It can be said unequivocally that external (outgoing) links from your site can have a positive effect directly on your site.

Remember that in this case, we are talking only about links to sites that are:

1) Relevant

2) Non-commercial

3) And the most important, in my opinion, are links that the reader will click on to get the additional information and return to your site

Full text of the study: “STUDY – OUTGOING LINKS USED AS RANKING SIGNAL“