Outbound/external links - good or bad?

[WallpaperInk]

I'll cut to the chase.

I've been putting quite a few outbound links in our blog posts lately, linking to sites giving more information about the topic, or at least acknowledging where I got the information from.

Now I thought that was good practice - it gives our readers more information on the topic, and links to other sites who in turn may link back to us (if we're lucky) - but I'm lead to believe that too many outbound links could hurt our SEO and put us in Google's bad books.

Any advice?

Thanks,

Sam.

 

[sophiesearch]

Hmm, this is a tricky one. Usually i'd say avoid giving out links altogether. However, someone recently told me that it's okay to link out, as long you are linking to high quality relevant sites. Sometimes you can "piggyback" off them and if they're a high power site, some of this will be passed back to you. I wouldn't worry about giving external links, but i would use them sparingly! Plus, make sure you set the links to open in a new tab as you don't want to be sending people away from your site.