SEO question

[mikey]

I received an e-mail from register.com with some SEO suggestions. Here's an excerpt:

Here's some insight about Search Engines from Register.com's SEO Expert Don Deveau.

Essentially, search engines look for relevant content (how often the popular words for your industry, business and geography appear on your site) combined with significant link share (links from your website to another). There are other factors involved, but if you have these two search engine optimization factors in place, then you have a good chance of ranking high in the search results.

He also addresses inbound links. We already know they're important.

My questions:

1) Do you agree that outbound links are important?

2) I recently added nofollow tags to links going out of my website. The nofollow tag idea is to have the search engines spider my site as long as possible before moving to another one. Are these links still considered outbound by the search engines?

If not, should I perhaps remove the nofollow tag from at least one outbound link on each page? Or would it be better to remove all of them?

thanks, Mike

[Sam Chapman]

Outbounds are important if they provide good information and resources for your human visitors. As long as you are keeping outbounds to fewer than 50 per page I don't see a reason for the nofollow.

[MikeDammann]

remove nofollow, don´t be link greedy. Link to sources of quality and don´t link to low quality sites just because they give a link back.

[Lydia]

The only time I use no-follow is when I link to a site that I view as a competitor (an example being the local paper, which has a large real estate section with IDX).

[Bigtoe]

There was some research done that pointed to it being a positive factor when you link to relevant sites of authority ie. government sites, schools

[Dave Kovaleski]

Agreed, keep the outbounds limited but to relevant and related sites and it won't have negative impact and in some cases can be positive.

[MikeDammann]

just imagine a human editor visiting your site next week and create something you wouldn't mind him seeing.

[Halfdeck]

I recently added nofollow tags to links going out of my website. The nofollow tag idea is to have the search engines spider my site as long as possible before moving to another one. Are these links still considered outbound by the search engines?

Outbound links can give Google an idea of the type of website you run. For example, if all of my sites links looked like ?affID=203423, Google might guess my site is an affiliate marketing site.

Or if many of my sites linked to my other sites, Google might think I'm trying to inflate my site's link popularity.

The truth is that Google prefers informational sites to commercial sites in the organic SERPs. So linking out to other sites in a way that makes your site look like a solid informational resource, I believe, can have its advantages.

Nofollowing every outbound link is a bad idea. I don't use nofollow on outbounds unless:

1. I'm linking out to black holes (links in, no links out - Wikipedia, for example).
2. I'm linking out to sites that already have millions of links (e.g Google)

Keep in mind, linking out is also a good marketing tactic, especially if you link to blogs, because due to things like trackbacks, bloggers will most definitely notice your link.