External Links for authorative boost

[njbox]

Hello

When I had hired few writers, they would always include external links to some authorative websites. At first, I thought are they spamming my own articles by sneaking in those links? I was explained that it is needed for authorative boost.

Is it still practical to follow this approach?
How do you find such websites that can be safely linked out from the article and still be topical?

 

[BakerStreet]

Hey,

It is common for people in the SEO community to do this as the mentality is that linking out to authoritative sites will boost your own site's authority. However, Google says that external links is not a ranking factor. My recommendation is to only link out to other sites if they help the user out. If not, don't.

What you're really looking for in content is that if it fulfils the search intent or not. If it does that w/o links then so be it. If it does that w/ link then great.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I'd say it's inconclusive, despite what Google says (one of them, maybe Mueller, did say very recently that external links don't matter) but that's also not what the evidence showed over the years. Things do change, though, and very rapidly.

It's almost to the point where I would just ignore Google beyond doing BASIC on-page optimization, and write for the human and link for the human and human human human. Because whatever it is that Google is doing with the "Helpful Content" classifier, it's more likely an "Optimized for Google" classifier, which is why it's been an absolute apocalypse for nearly anyone who knew what they were doing. Like the days when Google would see affiliate links on a page and say "bad page" just as a way to stick it to SEO's.

Write for humans, link out when it's helpful to a human, do basic on-page, and do marketing to humans. Everything should take care of itself if you go at it hard.

 

[bernard]

I link out when I quote someone or when I include data or mention a discussion and so on.

It's really just applying basic internet nettiquette from back in the day.

Like @Ryuzaki says, write for humans. I include quotes, links, sources, comments etc, as a way to help users.

If they like they can click through and read more. If they do that, they don't hit the back button and if they don't hit the back button, they don't give me bad user metrics for Rankbrain.