What are Inbound and Outbound links?

Most of the bloggers are obsessed with backlinks and always get in the debate of “dofollow” and “nofollow” links and always try to weigh their benefits and drawbacks. Most of the bloggers also sell and buy backlinks as they want to exchange some PR. This post will give you the overview of inbound and outbound links.

Inbound links:

 

Inbound links or commonly known as “backlinks” are the links pointing to your site and search engines like Google like it when you have thousands of links pointing to your site but sometimes Google penalizes you for it too if you have poor quality and irrelevant backlinks pointing to your site. Yes, because you have no authority over the inbound links which others post for you. Google only likes it when relevant links point to your site but as you have no control over them you cannot control which sites point to your site. But if your content is rich with information and unique then chances are that people will link to your site and there are more chances that those links will be “dofollow” and you will get some free and targeted traffic to your site. Inbound links that are “dofollow” also increase your website’s PR and SERPs and are considered healthy for any blog or website.

Outbound links:

These are the links pointing to other websites from your website and you have more control over these links. People have different views about outbound links and many say that it is against the SEO rules and search engines can penalize you for doing this. This approach is wrong; I know Google cannot penalize me if I put a link to Google inside my post. My theory is that you should link to relevant content if it gives more information to your readers. Bloggers are of the view that you lose traffic when you put outbound links in your posts but if you share useful resources then chances are that your readers will stick to your blog and will come back in search of more useful resources. But if you do put outbound links in your posts then make sure they are pointing to relevant, original and informative content.