Outbound Links to Authority Sites Good For SEO? - Search Engine Journal

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Google’s John Mueller offered his feedback on the SEO practice of linking out to authoritative websites. John Mueller explained the background of this SEO tactic and offered Google’s point of view about it, saying that it doesn’t really change anything.

Outbound Links to Authority Sites for SEO

There is an SEO practice dictating that that linking out to an authoritative website will help a site rank better.

This tactic doesn’t have any basis in anything a Googler said or published to indicate that linking to an authoritative site is a ranking factor or helps SEO.

It’s actually a practice that evolved from a 1998 algorithm research paper and from the seminal document of SEO practices created by one of the fathers of modern SEO, Brett Tabke.

HITS Algorithm

In 1998 Jon Kleinberg published a paper detailing his ranking algorithm research paper that used a new form of link analysis called, HITS.

This new process assigned a web page two scores:

1. A hub score
2. An authority score

Kleinberg based his HITS algorithm on the idea that some sites featured hand-curated pages that linked to authoritative sites. These sites that linked out to quality sites are called “hubs” and they were assigned a hub score.

The second idea behind HITS is that high quality sites...

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