The Act of Linking Out for SEO Purposes

As you work to improve your site’s “trust” in search engines by building strong PageRank, keep in mind that it’s also beneficial to build “trust” for other websites that you reference. The “trust rank” or link credibility is the most crucial factor among search engines as it measures ingoing and outgoing links between websites to determine which website is a trusted source among others and therefore credible. While inbound links matter most, search engines also pay attention to the sites you link out to, and linking to credible sites from yours is seen as a good thing. So, when you are referencing a source or an external page of interest that you trust, endorse it by directly linking to it from your site. If you must list a bunch of external links on a page, consider using the “nofollow” attribute on lesser credible websites, which will also help preserve your PageRank. Finally (and this is somewhat of a given), any visitor comments with links that users have posted should always be auto-tagged with the “nofollow” attribute in the page’s template. Use these best practices for linking out and contact your SEO team if you have any questions on link endorsing.