Outbound links play a critical role in your overall linking strategy. This runs counter to the philosophy that used be popular in the industry, that of hoarding PageRank. You do read less about the notion of hoarding PageRank these days than you used to, but I still think that many publishers do not fully understand why outbound links are important.

It all comes down to what you need to do to receive authoritative links. You have to get inside the head of the person who is going to make the decision about linking to you or not. If you don't understand their mindset, your chances of success go down dramatically. Remember that these people are going to the sole judge and jury in terms of deciding whether or not to give you a link.

For example, someone that works at MIT lives and breathes an academic environment. Here are three quick facts about that environment:

1. There is a lot of cutting edge research taking place there.
2. People are voraciously reading the latest research papers published by others.
3. They aggressively credit the sources they use (citation is required).

Imagine when that person comes to your site and sees nothing new under the sun in terms of content and no outbound links. It just does not feel or look right to them.

As a brief aside, earlier this week I reviewed a web site that had been heavily over-optimized. For example, it had links that had been crudely stuffed into the home page and pointed to lower level pages that added no real value. They were there purely for the purpose of linking to a page with anchor text that corresponded to a key search term.

When people go off the deep end with SEO, you end up with sites that don't even read correctly. An end user who did not know about SEO who read such a site would literally be scratching their head when they see the site. This certainly lowers the ability of the site to close business. In addition, such an over-optimized site has no chance of getting links from an authoritative site. None.

This phenomenon is not limited to the academic world. You will encounter the same conditions at government sites, or amongst people at major media sites, such as the NY times. The nature and depth of the types of research may be different, but the idea of citing sources and looking for high quality content to link to remains the same.

You can extend this notion further. Any time you look at a site and see that they have gone to the trouble of creating authoritative content (and cite other sources as well), you know you have someone that is going to expect similar behavior from any site they would consider linking to.

It's kind of a club, really. Once you become a recognized authority in a field, you are a part of the club. Along with other authoritative sources in the same and closely related fields, you will start to get links flowing without a tremendous amount of effort.

Publishers of authoritative sites almost always care about their users. They spend time thinking about increasing content quality and adding new content to their site. They are not afraid that when they link to someone else, they will lose traffic that will convert into business for them. They know that the links they send to others will mostly be used by people that are not finding on their site what they are looking for (so there really is very little to lose).

Picking Sites to Link To

The first thing that needs to happen is that you have to have the authoritative mindset. As outlined above, this means that you embark on a deliberate campaign to achieve a status of being an authority in your field, and demonstrating that authority in what you publish. This includes building relationships with other authorities in the field.

As you are researching on the web to learn the things you need to become an expert, make note of the sites that help you the most, in particular those that are not your most direct competition. Cite these sites as sources along the way. Your visitors will appreciate your site more, and you will make a much more attractive target for other authority sites to link to.