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Outbound links do absolutely nothing to SEO. Anyone can link to any page – it doesnt give you any authority whatsoever. Its a failed idea that people fabricated to encouarge people to backlink out.
Edwards reference for this is based on an “experiment” run by an agency that he shared that I took a look at. I discussed this with him and last night with another member of the sub.
The case study involved 4 brand new domains where 2 domains have outbound links and 2 dont. The 2 with outbound links ranked higher. The flaw or “intentional” magic in the case study seems designed to product this ouput. They claimed that to make the study equitable – each page would get the exact same links.
And this is where it gets interesting – I suspect that the people who created the test knew that dilution of links in a page is not exactly linear or proportional – the first links get more authority flow.
To me it was setup to prove the case study. And nobody questioned it.
Google – from Matt Cutts through to John Mueller this year have been adamant that it does nothing.
>What’s interesting is that before, with no active links, it was ranking just fine. After improving the references and pointing to high-authority sources, it dropped.
How long were you ranking, how many clicks did you get/ I assume that this was standard rotation testing and you didn’t have enough basis Topical Authority points to survive – this is really common.
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Right now it just feels like I improved the article and got a worse result.You cannot “improve” an article – you can change it. If the audience agrees its an improvement – or it works – then your CTR might carry you through. But “improvement” is highly subjective – and its a mutli-dimensional scale (its not a strictly linear plane)
The first thing I do at new projects is strip outbound links. I know a lot of Content Agencies who have had heated debates with me and clients about this and believe in content “quality” checking by Google insist on it – but we’ve removed citations and lost no rankings. However – we’ve seen much better internal ranking flow – and thats the point of SEO. Thats why understanding the mechanism of SEO is, to me, more important than following “North Star” rules like this.
Hope that helps u/KetoByDanielDumitriu
