What is External Links (Outbound Links)?

External links, or outbound links, are links from your website to a different domain. Linking to reputable sources helps readers verify claims and gives search engines context about your content.

External Links (Outbound Links) — SEO Library

Do outbound links help SEO?#

Linking out doesn’t pass your rankings away, and Google has encouraged sites to link to sources that are useful to readers. Good external links improve trust and usefulness: a statistic with a link to the original study is more credible than one without.

Best practices#

Link to original, authoritative sources — official documentation, research, primary data.
Use descriptive anchor text that tells readers where they’re going.
Mark paid, affiliate or sponsored links with rel="sponsored"; user-generated links with rel="ugc".
Check periodically for broken links — sources move or disappear.
Open external links in a new tab only if it genuinely helps your readers (this theme does it automatically with rel="noopener").

What to avoid#

Link exchanges (“I’ll link to you if you link to me”) at scale — a link scheme under Google’s spam policies.
Selling links that pass ranking signals without sponsored.
Linking to low-quality or harmful sites, especially in YMYL topics.