Why Outbound Links Are More Important For Your New Site Than Inbound Links

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

New webmasters often spend so much time fretting over gaining inbound links that they forget about or totally ignore the value of outbound links. But for new sites, outbound links are infinitely more important.

First, they connect you to the wider Web and give you social proof. Since the search engines crawl links to go from one page to another, all you need is one inbound link to your website to get the whole thing crawled. But outbound links tell just as much about your site as the inbound links. They tell the search engines that you are willing to provide valuable information for your visitors and that you aren’t just in it for the value to yourself.

Outbound links show up referrer logs. Because most webmasters care about where there traffic comes from, if you link out then you will appear in referrer logs. You’ll at least get traffic from those webmasters curious enough to know who you are and why you linked to them. They may even return the favor if they like what you are doing.

Inbound links are often cited as the value in delivering PageRank. But outbound links are just as important from a trust point of view. Site users who like the sites that you link to will come back to your site more often.

Outbound links can often lead to more inbound links.

When it comes to links, inbound links are very valuable, but you are better off building them gradually over time and through a process of diversity. Outbound links are valuable as part of your long term search engine optimization efforts in the beginning of your website’s life so that you can establish your value within your niche. In fact, establishing that value as early as possible is much more important than getting inbound links. Those will come in time if you build the value first.