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What is Outbound Link? The Functions and How to Use It

Last updated: Sep 07, 2022

https://cmlabs.co/en-sa/seo-terms/outbound-link

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What is Outbound Link?

Outbound link is a link on a website that directs audiences to another site. It is often commonly known as an external link. The use of such a link can add the context of your website content as it can provide the source of information to give beneficial insights to your audiences.

Types of Outbound Links

Outbound links are divided into two types, which are followed link and nofollowed link. Here is the explanation about the two of them:

Followed Link

The first type is followed link. If you use followed link, search engines will proceed to crawl or follow the link to another website. The search engine crawler will consider it as a backlink that you give to a website that is linked to yours.

Nofollowed Link

Contrary to the previous type, nofollowed link prevents search engines from following or crawling the website that is linked to yours. In this case, the other site will not get the backlink from your website.

The Functions of Outbound Links

Some people think that outbound links may not be beneficial for their sites, but only to others’. However, that’s not entirely true. In fact, linking your site to another website can give you several benefits.

To make it clear, here are the functions of outbound links that can help you increase the performance of your website:

Deepen the topic of the discussion, strengthen the context of the content, as well as explain the purpose of your content clearly.
Help optimize YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) content to fulfill Google E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, andTrustworthiness) standards.
Provide the resources to your audiences, learn about the topic further, and help them understand your content better.
Give your content more validity due to its trusted resources.

The Differences Between Outbound Links and Inbound Links

If the outbound links lead you out to visit another website, then inbound links do the other way around. Inbound links serve to direct users to pages that exist within your site. It is also commonly known as backlink.

Inbound link and outbound link are two types of links that are equally important to improve the user experience, authority, and the context of content on your website. This is why you should not only focus on building backlinks without considering linking yours to another site. Make sure to see that the website you link to is relevant and of high quality.

How to Use Outbound Links Effectively

After knowing what an outbound link is and its functions, you should know how to use it effectively. Here are the tips to use outbound links on your website:

Make sure that the outbound links lead your users to websites with high domain authority scores that are relevant to your niche.
Use the attribute tag to let Google know about your relations with the websites that you are linked to through outbound links.
Proceed to audit outbound links periodically to find broken links or mistakes in attribute tags.