Links

[TJ2007]

Forgive my ignorance, I know a lot of you are very advanced at this stuff, but I am always seeing posts that links to quality sites help your rankings;

My question: is it enough just to have a lot of outgoing links from your site to other quality related sites to boost your ranking,
I am thinking that links back to your site only help boost your traffic not rankings?

Help please:)

If this is the case why wouldn't everyone just have links to all the major players, whether they wanted them or not, but maybe that's not ethical or legit? Just wondering the logic behind it all.

[Ralph]

You have asked a very broad question. Having links to other high value sites does not hurt you as long as they are relevant to your site. Having links from valued sites help your page rank. The value of page rank could be argued forever. You need a few back links (links from someone) to help the search engines find your site and index your site.

How many links you have and types of link’s, are a whole other issue. You can find other threads on this forum that argue all sides of that point. Content is another issue that you need to address as you develop your site. Again much has been written on the subject and can be found in the forum.

The final area of concern in linking is their need to be “Natural”. Stay away from automated linking services. Again read in the forums. It will be time well spent.

[TJ2007]

Thanks for your input

So sounds like links back to your site are just as important outgoing links from your site...when it comes to getting to the top of the search engines

[MR22]

It is more important to have links pointing back to your site rather than linking out to other sites. Although linking to other sites is good and will not hurt your rankings, you should focus more on building quality links to your website. That is what helps boost your pr and rankings, linking to other sites just shows that you are providing vistors with good resourses.

[spanishproperty]

It is good to have good link bait on you sites, but for me it is a matter of trying to keep the arriving visitors on my sites not letting them go to other sites.

The only thing with this is that you can over do it and maybe it could hurt you?

[VicBilson]

Outbound links are fine, especially if you are linking to valuable information your visitors might want to see.

Inbound links are better... much better. The best are from other authoritative sites within your same market niche.

I've found that links from Blogs and Social Bookmarking sites are excellent.

- Vic Bilson

[bmc]

One way inbound links are the ones that matter the most for PR and SERP. To rank high in search engines, you need to build lots of one way inbound links. The more, the better.

[Monkeyleg]

Inbound links, especially from respected sites, are absolutely necessary.

However, linking to very popular authority sites helps your site as well. Let's say that your site is about new cars. A link to GM's site, or Toyota's, or other manufacturers would be natural, and expected.

In the end, it's all about what appears to be natural. It's the seemingly unnatural that gets sites in trouble.

[rainier]

Inbound links are very helpful in giving you a better rankings especially if those incoming links are related to your site and if the site has a high PR too.

[kidd24]

Yes one way link can be a big help to have good PR but also, we should consider the site that you want to add links is more relevant to your site as well.