E402: What happens if you don’t link out to other websites?
This SEO experiment tests this.
The results are 100% clear - they, in fact, could not be any more clear. The clarity of the results is crazy.
SEO Experiments from: https://seosherpa.com/seo-experiments/
00:00 Today's SEO Experiment 00:36 Outbound Links 01:36 The Experiment 02:15 Setup and Results 03:51 Actionable Insights 04:38 Practical Applications 06:23 Wrap-Up
#seo #searchengineoptimization #digitalmarketing #buildinpublic
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/
We got another SEO experiment on today's episode of the Edward Show. This SEO experiment is called link to other websites to lift your rankings. It comes from SEO Sherpa.com forward slash SEO dash experiments. This is number nine on the list of SEO experiments that everybody should read. If you haven't read the document, that's okay. Because I share experiments from this article all the time on the show. I love these experiments. I first read this article in 2016 when it came out. It was eye opening and these experiments have been updated every year since. Linking to other websites is a best practice in search engine optimization, but lots of people don't actually know just how dramatic it is. This is what this section, this SEO experiment section says in this article. If you don't know about how powerful linking to other websites is for the rankings of your website, you're going to enjoy this episode. Outbound links dilute your site's authority. This has been the generally conceived notion in the world of search engine optimization for some time. And this despite Google saying that linking to related resources is a good practice. So why are SEO so against outbound links? Outbound links just means linking to another website, linking to a website that is not your own. The idea is that outbound links lose you page rank. The more outbound links, the more page rank you give away. And since losing page rank means losing authority, the outcome of linking out is lower rankings, right? Well, let's find out. Shy or funny. I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly. Shy and the team at reboot put this notion to the test in their outgoing links experiment for the experiment. Shy set up 10 websites, all with similar domain formats and structure. Each website contained a unique 300 word article, which was optimized for a made up word, Philando sick prior to the test. The word Philando sick showed zero results in Google. So if you search Philando sick prior to the test would receive the message from Google, your search Philando sick did not match any documents. There was nothing which was perfect in order to test the effect of outbound links. Three full follow links were added to five of the 10 domains, follow links, pass link juice, no follow links, don't pass link juice, though they are still good for SEO. Lots of people don't realize no follow links are still good for search engine optimization. Follow links are generally the best, but you want to have a healthy mix or else Google will perceive your backlink profile as spam and then your rankings will be worse. But either way, just generally speaking, very generally speaking, follow links are better because they pass authority. So again, in order to test the effect of outbound links linking to other websites, three full follow links were added to five of the 10 domains, the links pointed to highly trusted websites, Oxford University, which has a domain authority of 92 out of 100 genome research Institute domain authority of 85 out of 100 Cambridge University domain authority of 93 out of 100. These are very high domain authorities. So all of these links are going to these high domain authority sites. Once all the test websites were indexed, rankings were recorded. Here are the results and it's crazy. I'm going to share the screenshot of this on YouTube for anybody who's watching. But if you're listening, I'm going to describe it. The results are clear as night and day. Every single website with outbound links out ranked those without so I want to say that again, every single website that linked out to other websites outranked the sites that did not link out to other websites. This means your action step is simple. Each time you post an article to your site, make sure it includes a handful of links to relevant and trustworthy resources. As reboots experiments prove, it will serve your readers and your rankings. It's the best practice linked to trustworthy resources. The domain authority on my personal website is 34 out of 100. Listen, that's not bad. Feel free to link out to my website too. I'll give a little bit more context. This mostly applies to top of funnel content. When you're doing bottom of funnel SEO, the landing pages can be very short. For bottom of funnel SEO, the searchers already know what they are looking for. They're just looking for the brand that will give it to them. For that reason, you don't really have to link out to other websites. If you're giving a statistic, it helps to site your source for the statistic or any example, it always helps to site sources. But for bottom of funnel SEO, you don't have to link out to other websites. But for top of funnel content or even content in the middle of the funnel, it is a best practice absolutely to link out to other websites. This section doesn't say why this is, but it's a very practical and easy to understand reason why Google values websites that link out to other websites. It shows that these websites are citing their sources and that makes websites more trustworthy and authoritative. Very similarly, when I make my videos, I show lots of examples, my daily videos that come out to Instagram Reels or TikTok or anywhere else. I share lots of examples in the videos. I also share screenshots of the text that say some of the things that I'm saying in the videos I like to cite my sources. This makes people trust me more and this makes people trust my videos more and this makes my videos perform better. If you link out to trustworthy sites, Google sees you as more trustworthy yourself. I am not shy linking out to other websites with a follow link. I am not shy about it at all. And the results are clear as night and day. Again, lots of people who have been an SEO know this, but if you're new to SEO, you might not know this and even me who's been doing SEO for over a decade. Just again, because I've read this study several times before, but just again, to see the screenshot of all of the websites that link out to other websites, every single one of them outperforms the websites that don't link out. And that is a crazy confirmed result. It is amazing. Even for me, it's exciting to see that. So that's what I wanted to share with you on today's episode of The Edward Show. This is episode of four hundred and two of my daily digital marketing podcast. I like seeing these best practices that are without a shadow of a doubt, confirmed just like this, every single website that linked out to other websites outperformed the websites that did not link out. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening. Hope this gets you excited and I will talk to you again tomorrow. I do this thing every day. I will talk to you again tomorrow.
