If you want to keep your visitors on your site for the longest amount of time possible, you might not want to have too many outbound links.  You might also want to keep your hard earned visitors so they don’t wander their way onto your competitor’s site.  It is also said that outgoing links can have a negative effect on your search engine rankings because you are spreading too much page rank around.  On the other hand, links pointing to other sites might actually be good for your search engine rankings and for your site’s overall usability.
Here are some tips I have in regards to outbound links:

  • Link to sites that could be of use to your visitors.  If the sites you link to are of use to them, they will view your site as being more valuable.  After all, outbound links should help your visitors find what they want to find.  A site with inbound links should also have outbound links.
  • If you find yourself linking to too many “other sites.”  You might want to add a rel=”nofollow” to the link codes.  This is to ensure that Google doesn’t penalize you for having too many outbound links.
  • Linking to highly reputable and respected websites in your niche has been all but proven to help your search engine rankings.  This means that if you have a basketball site, you might want to throw up links to NBA.com and ESPN.com.  If you have a medical related site, you might want to put a link on your site to WebMD.com.

If you put your visitors first, you will always succeed!  Don’t worry about losing visitors to other sites via outbound links.  If your site isn’t crap, they will always come back!