Can the Wrong Outbound Links Hurt You?

A recent forum post over at Webmaster World offered some insight as to whether outbound links to shady websites can hurt your rankings:

It's unlikely that your outbound linking is causing your pages to be listed in the supplemental, rather than main index.

Also, be assured that we're not looking to penalize folks for a "bad" link here and there. Rather, our algorithms are tuned to look for patterns of "egregious" linking behavior... both on individual sites and in the aggregate.

"With that said, it's certainly in your users' interest that you regularly audit outgoing links on your site (especially prominent ones) to ensure that you're not losing folks' trust by sending them to inappropriate places or 404 pages. Sure, it's great to keep Google happy, but it's usually more important (long term) to have your users be return visitors.

This comes from Adam Lasnik of Google. I'm glad he points out that you should put your readers before search engines. Some people forget that in the grand scheme of things. I call it "SEO tunnel vision"!

Until next time...

-The Austin SEO Guy