eMarketing - Outbound Links / Authority Site Linking
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To appreciate how outgoing links can assist your site's ranked position one look beyond 'my site' and the site (page) being linked to in order to see the bigger picture.Many SEO firms are stuck on a bad premise ' linking out is a bad thing.
They believe: 1. Outgoing links are a drain on their hard fought Google's PageRank (a version of link popularity) development campaigns
2. Outgoing links reduces rank position in search engines, and
3. Outgoing links can also give away valuable visitors to other sites
Some will attempt to protect themselves from these occurrences by using JavaScript on outgoings links (where search engines cannot follow JavaScript) to avoid passing on PageRank. They will use a Meta Robot Tag with 'Noindex' (to avoid the page being indexed thus no loss of PageRank) or 'Nofollow' (to stop the search engines indexing robot from following these links). They will use their robot.txt to disallow search engines from pages with outgoing links on them, so not to have these pages indexed. They will also hide the link ' making it appear as simple normal text on the page stopping visitors from easily finding these links.
Although these firms are successful, their original premise is flawed. Google (and other search engines) value outgoing links particular if the 'linked to' page is of the same topic as the page being linked. More importantly, your visitors will benefit from such links. If these outgoing links are to an authority site (a trusted source of information e.g. NASA website for the topic of space) you stand an enormous chance of gaining far more than you lose.
Link Trading 
