How important are outbound links for SEO in 2020?

Still hesitating how to make your content optimized and attractive for users? Boost your text with outbound links and seo now – outgoing links navigating from a page, play a crucial role for Google. Since this feature is partially undervalued, we will now discover their real value. So if you do outbound links would you set the link on nofollow or on dofollow? Here we will find the answer to this question.

What are outbound links?

So, what is an outbound link? It’s an external link, also known as outgoing links, which navigates readers to another website from your website and have straightforward purposes. On the contrary, if links land users to another page of the same domain, they’re called internal. Internal links are integrated in the same way, but have a different purpose. You may have faced some myths related to outgoing links, however, these are delusions:

• Constant avoidance of outbound links leads to navigating readers to other sources – Vice versa, it strengthens the reliability of your content.
• There is no control of information relevance in the included link – It is managed on demand, you can smoothly update the URL.
• The only way to bind readers to your site is opening outbound links in a new browser tab – It takes place, if the quality of your content is not high.
• External links should permanently have a nofollow tag to web directories and recognize your blog as reliable and authoritative. Let’s discover it together now.

 Why then are external links so important?

The significance of the using outer links is making the text more natural for search engines by improving organic traffic. Google elicits high-quality external sources to be trustworthy and have an ease of doing business. Why does it happen? Let’s consider top-quality articles which in good common practice always provide references to their resources. Similar to personal reviews, the piece becomes stronger if referencing outside opinions and evidence. Readers notice the background used for fulfilment and decide on the reliability and trustworthiness of a source. Engaged readers are likely to follow sources, that grasp their attention with facts and real proof. In such a way the outbound links make the resource more authoritative. Search portals help discover useful and trustworthy content with external links, building up the topic as a browser’s search feature is designed in such a way that specific websites will be found rapidly if there are more links leading to it. Additionally, among the ways of optimizing your site with search engines via linking to external sources are:

•          Data origin referencing, domain authority. Google trusts such sources more, and suggests such sites often.
•          Grounding on assertion/fact. Readers notice the proof, dispelling doubts.
•          Inspirational sources, which help frame thoughts.
•          Point illustration and citing uncommon thought which first came to someone else

Going back to the importance of outer links, consider that pages navigating to similar content perform better and are more marketable than ones without external links.

Should outbound links be ‘nofollow’ or ‘dofollow’? 

All seo outbound links are divided into: ‘nofollow’ and ‘dofollow’ ones. Let’s have a brief overview of the specific types. ‘Nofollow’ links were introduced by Google in 2005 for fighting spam in the comments. Decades ago and till current time, we’ve all found inappropriate comments, aiming to attract a consumer's attention. The comments usually restrained a link to spam or an advertisement, placed to obtain a benefit from the corresponding source. Texts with ‘nofollow’ links for sure do not receive any benefit while results of the search request are ranked. To protect reliable content, Google implemented and successfully uses this link type. ‘Dofollow’ links allow the search spider bot to land the link. People can easily observe you if your websource is ‘dofollow’. And, correspondingly, the usage of such urls only improves your SEO. The difference in nofollow and dofollow also grounds on the usage of HTML tags, needed for building the links. The ‘rel’ attribute is a distinct feature of these types. ‘Nofollow’ links have the ‘rel’ attribute in their structure, which the browser’s search option recognizes it. ‘Dofollow’ links do not contain this attribute. Several examples of the links are below:

•          ‘Nofollow’ link is usually added to the webpage:  <a href="https://www.texts/"rel="nofollow">text</a>
•          Fulfilment sample of website with ‘dofollow’ joint: <a href="https://www.anytest">anytext</a>

Let’s define the pros for implementing ‘dofollow’ links on your webpage:

•          Readers visit the external sources as they rely on your content.
•          ‘Dofollow’ links may be placed on a variety of resources and lead to the main website to improve the ranking.
•          Strengthens the ascendancy of your blog or website within browsers.
•          Brands are happy to work with such links for promotion and referrals.
•          Such links encourage users to comment more.

However, some cons exist as well:

•          Spam comments may be placed frequently, and their moderating will become time consuming.
•          Google can consider the site suspicious, if it contains only dofollows.

Regarding the usage of nofollow links in SEO, the advantages are listed below:

• Provide variety to your website (some sources will reference you as nofollow for sure). The website looks more natural, containing both types of go links within it, so that Google does not deem it suspicious.
• Compatible ‘nofollow’ links on a website generate an increased amount of traffic, which in by definition accumulates dofollow links.

Of course, one can find disadvantages for ‘nofollow’ links. Among them could be:

• Links within the site may not pass Google’s quality & quantity measurements . The service name is PageRank. 1 It allows checking the source and promoting it to the audience.
• Other sources will not find your source to include in announcement campaigns for new products or services.

It is crucial that when priming an external url to add to the website, remember the purpose you are trying to achieve, as this choice will play a major role in future web fulfillment. When should you use ‘Nofollow’?  When taking into account the pros and cons of ‘nofollow’ links and you are still doubting whether and when to implement them? Consider these tips:

• Safe text is granted. A ‘Nofollow’ outbound link retains safety in the comments and other text messages in public repositories (for example, trackbacks and refer lists).
• Reliability is a major point. Just always set outbound links as ‘nofollow’ to not dilute the value of your page.
• Additional conversion is not the aim.  ‘Nofollow’ links just don’t convey page ranks or ‘anchor’ text. The readers stay at your resource.
• Improving SEO is planned later. Website SEO remains untouched. Such types of hyperlinks will be useful if there is no desire to promote content.

How to add outbound links to the content?

Adjoining outbound links to a blog or site requires attention to details and domain understanding. External urls in the text should perform one and only one purpose – navigate users from one website to another source, just define the appropriate placement and verify the source’s relevancy. An external link should be concise and appropriate. See this check list of questions to answer before choosing the right link to add:

• Content of the piece really corresponds and is applicable to your sphere? It’s crucial to add only correct info and be precise.
• Is an original date placed in the source? Much content meaning becomes distorted if taken and rewritten several times.
• Is the publisher a rational expert? Expertise is half the battle!
• What is the publishing date or the latest update took place? hIs the info still up-to-date? No necessity to cite not actual information, which already can be incorrect.
• Is the page producer reputable? You can always search for references in google.
• Source is correct and there are a minimum amount of drawbacks? No well-educated person will continue researching, if the resource is unpleasant to read.

Of course, you should then proofread and check the correctness of all links when publishing the page. Placing incorrect or ‘broken’ links will lead to losing readers and increase their dissatisfaction. It also results in reducing rankings and website content reliability. Additionally, ensure links span no more than five consecutive words, otherwise they may be lost in the context. You can always refer to different style guides and related documentation to create really compelling content with integrated outbound links.

How to add outbound links in WordPress?

WordPress is a widely used tool for building and maintaining websites. As outer links are rather important, WordPress allows us to provide them smoothly. Let’s describe the sections, where hyperlinks are widely used. In WordPress outer links are easily added to posts, widgets, footer area, page, navigation menu, etc. Each of these sections is an important part of SEO, and no typos will benefit. Below we list the steps, to add a link to any type of website text: 

• First, highlight the text where you need to attach an external link. The selected words become the ‘anchor’ text.
• Second, click the ‘Link’ button. The section for link address will appear.
• Third, type or paste the URL in the corresponding area and click ‘Apply’ or press ‘Enter’.
• Finally, check that the user can smoothly navigate to the appropriate source in one click with the text area, and if the link has the appropriate tags.

In WordPress there is also an opportunity to set whether the link should open in a new, or same browser tab. Start adding the link by the steps above and then click the arrow. You’ll need to select a corresponding toggle button ‘Open in New tab’, and apply the changes. Link building in WordPress is an easy way to improve SEO on your website. Here you can clearly distinguish the type of link you paste, and manipulate them as needed. Mind the tags to apply the ‘nofollow’ and ‘dofollow’ link types for your site.

Do Outbound Links Affect SEO?

The main question that concerns external links and SEO, is whether the usage of outbound links has a direct effect on the ranking. The contradictions about using nofollow links specifically aim to not increase the SEO of other sources. However, the web spider still notices such links in the text, especially if they lead to a popular website or blog. Researches note that linking to other websites seo significantly influences the rankings of your website, even if they’re tagged nofollow. Moreover, most backlinks from the popular sources (for example, social networks – FaceBook, Youtube, Twitter, popular forums and Wiki) contain such tags.  The nofollow outbound links SEO aim to be a referral traffic source and help to increase the amount of dofollow links. Another important reason is that nofollows can shield from Google sanctions – your site can be a good place for sponsored posts, or an easily found source for users. Meanwhile, below we have gathered the possibilities for using the outbound links:

• Website authority notably increases due to the trust of the readers, if mentioned in other sources.
• More audience and a broader community area is added to your web portal with ‘dofollow’ links.
• Categorizing or ‘ranking’ will be increased at times with outbound links distributed properly and naturally. Such web resources are appreciated by web crawlers.
• Reliability of the website increases much.
• Websites will have protection from spam comments with ‘nofollow’ links.

So when asking do outbound links help SEO?  The answer is definitely Yes. The external links SEO make the site’s fulfilment clear, complete, and optimized. Since the Internet becomes more artificial, the links also have to accelerate and adapt to the mainstream. SEO is developing very fast, as well as outbound links.

2026 Update: What I Would Change About This Advice Today

I wrote this post back in 2020 and, honestly, some of it holds up well. The core principle that outbound links signal trust and context to search engines is still true. But the SEO landscape has shifted enough that I want to add some important caveats before you take the original advice at face value and run with it.

The biggest change I have seen in practice is how Google now treats link quality versus link quantity. In 2020, the conversation was fairly straightforward: link out to credible sources and you will be rewarded. In 2026, that is still true, but the bar for what counts as a "credible source" has risen sharply. With AI-generated content flooding every corner of the web, Google has become far more discerning about the neighbourhood your links point to. I now tell my clients to audit their outbound links every quarter, not just once at publication. A source that was solid in 2022 may have since been bought out, redirected, or quietly turned into a content farm.

Something else worth flagging is the rise of AI Overviews in search results. These are pulling content and its associated citations into featured placements, which means the pages you link to are now part of a wider trust signal ecosystem. Linking to a page that itself gets cited in AI Overviews carries more weight in my experience than it used to. It is not something Google has spelled out in its documentation, but I have noticed the pattern consistently enough across client sites to take it seriously.

On the tools front, I have been using Screaming Frog alongside Ahrefs to run outbound link audits at scale, and I have found it genuinely useful to cross-reference those with manual checks rather than relying on automation alone. No tool catches everything, and context still matters. A link that looks fine on paper can still sit awkwardly within your content if the destination page has shifted its focus.

My honest 2026 take is this: outbound linking is still one of the most underused on-page SEO tactics I see people neglecting. But it is no longer something you can set and forget. Treat your outbound links like relationships, check in on them, make sure they still reflect what you want your content to stand next to. The original post below gives you a solid foundation, just read it with these updates in mind.