Google’s John Mueller says Outbound links are “a great way to provide value to your users”

You must have seen people referencing a term called “Outbound Links” in the various SEO groups. Basically, these are the links which you have on different websites, forums or other places. This is one of the best methods to improve the ranking of any website according to various SEO professionals. This is also helpful in getting traffic to your website. Because if you have your link on a website which is already getting traffic, people might click on your site from that website and they might spend some time on your website as well.

Although this method works well, there is no official confirmation as yet if this method helps in ranking a website. Now, John Mueller from Google has responded to this million-dollar question in a new explainer video series by Google. The question in Google’s series is that “Does linking to other websites help or hurt SEO?”

While some say that this question was not answered properly, we at least get something as a reply from John Mueller. Here is the answer from John Mueller on the above-mentioned question:

“Linking to other websites is a great way to provide value to your users. Often times, links help users to find out more, to check out your sources and to better understand how your content is relevant to the questions that they have.”

John Mueller does not explain here how this affects rankings of a website but he tells the obvious thing about outbound links. It is the fact that if you place your link on different websites, people are likely to visit your website and thus increase your traffic as well as other factors affecting SEO. So indirectly, Google’s John Mueller might have said that it does not affect SEO negatively.

Having said that, we still can’t claim that Google officially acknowledges the use of outbound links as a way to increase the ranking of a website.