Do Outgoing Links Improve Link Popularity?

Outgoing links refers to links pointing to other sites from your webpages. This issue of whether outgoing links contribute to link popularity is a hotly debated issue amongst the search engine optimization community.

The fact is, outgoing links do dilute the Google PageRank rating carried over to other pages by the rest of the links on the page.

Some SEO experts may not agree with me on this next point, but that’s OK.

I also believe that linking to other relevant websites can also help your search engine rankings, although it may not specifically help your link popularity as such. Let me give you an example of why I believe this.

1. Find a subcategory within the Yahoo! Directory.  http://dir.yahoo.com
2. Search for the topic of that particular subcategory in a search engine such as Google. You are more than likely to find the Yahoo! Directory category page listed amongst the top 30 search results.

Here are some examples:

Search Term:  “communications and networking”
Google Search:
http://www.google.com/search?q=communications+and+networking
Ranking: #1
Yahoo! Directory Category:
http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Communications_and_Networking/

Search Term:  “computer generated art”
Google Search:  http://www.google.com/search?q=computer+generated+art
Ranking: #1
Yahoo! Directory Category:  http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Visual_Arts/Computer_Generated/

Search Term: ” computer generated music”
Google Search: http://www.google.com/search?q=computer+generated+music
Ranking: #1
Yahoo! Directory Category: http://dir.yahoo.com/Entertainment/Music/Computer_Generated/

As you can clearly see, Yahoo! does not offer any substantial content for those particular topics. It merely offers links to relevant websites. Yet many of its web directory pages are considered as relevant pages for the search queries listed.

Is this a fluke? Is this limited to Google, because of its relationship with Yahoo?

I doubt it very much. Conduct the same search on other major search engines and you will find the same pages listed amongst the top ranked search results in those engines as well.

Some astute search engine optimizers have already gotten onto this fact and have designed links pages to take advantage of this. I have actually landed on these links pages as a result of a clicking through a top ranked Google listing.

well, you can make conclusion from this.

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