Before I start my first post here on YOUmoz, let me say a quick hello.

Hello, everyone!

That'll do. Over the past couple of months my mind has been drawn to outbound links, and there is a good reason for this that I will go into shortly.

Whenever outbound links are mentioned in an SEO environment, the response is usually negative. I have read recently on some blogs that it even casts a very negative shadow over outbound links, stating they could "harm your site's PageRank." I know this is simply referring to the old "bad neighbourhood," but I have wondered for a while now what the effect of outbound links are.

Not even 3 weeks ago, I had the opportunity to sit down with a client who had attempted to optimise his pages himself (his SEO knowledge was modest, to say the least). He did not understand why he was not ranking for keywords in his content. To be honest, there was no surprise in his rankings when analysing his links, keyword theme, etc....

However, one aspect of his site that got my attention was his 'anchored' outbound links. Why did this get my attention? Because one of the keywords he was ranking in the top 3 for was one of these anchored outbound links. This baffled me, as he did not include this keyword in his main tag's title, meta, heading, etc...

Why did he rank so highly? Is there something in outbound links we're not considering? I wish I could show you this site but I never took the client on and would not want to break any privacy laws. All I can say is that it is a fishing site that describes the best areas in the UK to fish and what fish you will find (riveting, I know :) ). The sites he was linking out to were .gov sites and local businesses with pretty high authority. He had very little in the way of backlinks and his site was around 6 months old.

It has been common knowledge for a long time that linking to authoritive sources can help establish some visibility; however, I am beginning to think that outbound links hold a lot more weight than is generally perceived. What do you guys think?