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What is an outbound link?

What is an outbound link you ask? Well an outbound link is a search engine optimization term that refers to how many sites link to your website. If 23 pages across various websites link to yours, then you have 23 outbound links.

Notice I said pages and not websites. That is because one website can provide you with multiple outbound links. If one website links to your site 6 times … 1 time on 6 different pages, it is likely that the search engines will count that as 6 different outbound links.

So what does having outbound links matter to you? Outbound links are used in various ways with search engines. Outbound links helps to determine your page rank, it also helps to determine relevance to certain keyword phrases, based on the text of the link. For example if I were to make a link to my site Live Naked Men, it becomes an outbound link and improves the relevance for that site for the keywords Live Naked Men.

In theory the more outbound links you have, the better. But there are a few fine parts to that rule that you need to pay attention to. First and foremost, you don’t want to be a part of a site that has more outgoing links than it has content. Search engines might see that website as a link farm and penalize you for being a part of it.

Next make sure that the links are relevant, not only in what the title of the link is from their site to yours, but that their site is at least remotely related to yours. You want blonde tits sites to link to your blonde tit site. If the two sites linking to each other are similar in nature then some experts say the links are worth way more to you when it comes to SEO.

I need to be clear here because this is an area that so many webmasters make a mistake in. You should trade links with websites that are similar in nature to your own, but they don’t have to be exactly the same. If I have a site about blondes showing their tits and you have a site about blondes with big tits and we were to trade links, it would benefit both of us greatly.

It does not matter what either of the sites look like … what matters is that the search engines relate blonde and tits and that each of our sites link to each other. That means we are both more relevant for those related search terms. How much more relevant varies on a wide number of factors. But that’s another article all together. For now you just need to know that when trading hard links you want to trade with sites that are remotely related in theme to your own. The more related, the more important the link is.

One final note is to be careful. There is the good old guilt by association rule which basically means you want to check EVERY site you are about to trade links with in Google and Yahoo. If that website is nowhere to be found in either of those search engines you don’t want to trade links with them because they could be banned and there is some evidence that any site associated with banned sites gets penalized. So avoid sites that don’t already appear in search engines.

On a final note on this subject, do not pay to get listed with any site, nor do you want to trade links with any website that charges money for text links. Paying for links for the sole purpose of search engine optimization is not a legal practice with Google and probably other search engines and could very well get you banned. DO NOT PAY FOR LINK TRADES. DO NOT CHARGE FOR LINK TRADES. Is that one link really worth getting banned from Google? Trust me, it’s not. No one link is worth that.

Now all of that aside, let’s talk about your own network of websites. Did you know that you can help your own outbound links? If you run more than one site, you sure can! You may have heard of people running “blog networks”. This is partly why some of them do it.

Let us say that you have MySite-A.net. It doesn’t really matter what you have there, it could be a free site, that you make money on from sponsors or a membership site - just that it is your main site. You create a new site called MySite-B.net. You make this into a blog site where you post random ramblings about a topic similar in nature to your other website, MySite-A.net. Out of the 337 posts on MySite-B.net, you mention your other website, MySite-A.net in 7 of those posts. Those too count as outbound links. The one thing you need to make sure of those so you don’t get an association penalty, is that both MySite-A.net and MySite-B.net are on their own IPs. If both sites are on the same IP then much evidence has shown that search engines know the sites are run by the same person and doesn’t really give much weight to the links.

Some people prefer to build their own collection of websites rather than waste time trying to trade links with other relevant websites, simply because the one thing you learn with experience is that trading links sucks. The second you put up their link, they take down yours or they go under and their website is no longer around. It really really really is just a hassle. I traded 27 links at Klub Kelli in 2007, out of those 27 real link trades, only 7 still have my link up and as such, I have theirs in return. 20 out of those 27 dropped my link without notice or they went out of business. What a total waste of my time! There are some webmasters who try and trade 10 links a day - so just imagine how much time they wasted with ratios like that!

But no matter what you do, build your own network of websites or trade links all day long, you still need to network with other websites to be valid.

If you do want to build your own network of websites remember to take advantage of offers from affiliate programs that offer free hosting. You can build a website, with some great links to your own main website and it costs you nothing because they host your site for free. I host my porn star site Free Tory Lane with the affiliate program Bling Bucks. I get the benefit of a website in my network to build up relevant links to my other wises, while they pay for the hosting. All I have to do in return is promote their website within my pages of that website, which is super easy since they also provide a lot of the content I used to build the site itself.