Outbound links are called links that lead from one site to another. They are often added to web pages as part of a reciprocal link exchange strategy, when you link to a blog, web service or online store, and it links to your online resource.
At first glance, there are no downsides to this strategy — you build up referral mass without investing a single cent in it. But in reality, everything is not so easy. The impact of the site's outbound links is huge, and by adding them to your blog or online store, you give some of the page weight to the site you are linking to. As a result, the referral promotion strategy, built on the mutual exchange of links, begins to harm the promotion of the resource, instead of helping it.
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An important rule to remember if you are going to promote the site yourself is to try to place a minimum of outgoing links and receive a maximum of incoming links.
How to find outbound links
SEO specialists use the following tools to find outbound links on the site:
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Software for Windows, macOS and Ubuntu. There is a free version with a limit of 500 scanned pages. An annual license for the full version of the software costs ?149.
- Netpeak Spider. SEO software for Windows with a free 14-day trial period. An annual subscription costs $182.4.
- ahrefs. Online tool for site analysis and promotion. It is possible to test the service for 7 days for 7 dollars and issue an annual subscription for 198-1998 dollars.
- SimilarWeb. A service that analyzes the traffic of any site in the world, and also has a number of other features, including the search for external links. The price of use is discussed with the manager.
- Xenu's Link Sleuth. A free program for Windows that, despite its outdated design, has powerful functionality. In addition to searching for broken links, it can also find outgoing links.
Next, we will consider the method of finding the source links of the site using the Netpeak Spider program:
- Enter the URL of the site in the "Start URL" field and click "Start".
- Wait for the scan to finish and go to the All Results tab.
- Find the "External links" column and click on its title. This is how you arrange the pages from those with the most outbound links to those with no external links.
- Double-click the number that indicates the number of source URLs.
- In the window that opens, you will see the external links found in the code of the selected page.
How to remove outgoing links from the site
Once the pages with external links are found, do the following:
- Remove source URLs unless it makes the content less useful.
- If the pages have external links that are important for the site, prohibit the transfer of internal weight to them using the rel=”nofollow” attribute. To do this, add it to the end of the a href structure: < a href=”https://example.com/” rel=”nofollow” >Outbound link anchor< /a >
- If for some reason you need to leave the transfer of weight to an external link, use the attribute target="_ blank" so that the link opens in a new tab: < a href=”https://example.com/” target=”_blank”>Outbound link anchor < /a >
Thus, when clicking on the URL, your site will remain open and the probability that the visitor will return to it will increase.
Now you know how to find outbound links and remove them easily. By ridding the site of external links and, of course, following our other recommendations for optimizing an online resource (for example, a correctly structured site structure ), you will accelerate the movement of a blog or online store to the cherished first position of search engine results.
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