The importance of outgoing links?
There’s always debate whether outgoing links carry any weight in Seach Engine Results Page (SERP).
No one other than the people who work on the search engine algorithm can provide the exact answer. Most webmasters are debating on the issue based on experience and sometimes rumors.
I’ll share my 2 cents here.
From search engine perspective, I don’t think outgoing link carry any weight in SERP factor.
It’s logical thinking, if outgoing links are useful, any people can simply link to all the big sites and improve their SERP.. without skills or any hassles. That just don’t make much sense.
Even if outgoing links do carry weight in SERP, the effect will be very minimal. An incoming link will probably wipe out the effectiveness of 100 outgoing links.
There are a couple of points that probably need to be noted in the use of outgoing links though..
The quality of outgoing links matters. It probably won’t give you any extra edge in SERP if you have good outgoing links, but it’s general believe that webmasters will be penalized for having bad outgoing links. (Bad in terms of dead links, spam sites, link farms, adults, gambling etc)
Also it’s often that a visitor will be judging in a website with the outgoing links it provided. If you are providing useful links, chances are that the visitor will come back to your site looking for more information in the future.
So, do provide useful outgoing links from readers point of view, not from the SEO or SERP perspective.