If you never link to other sites from your own site, could this be considered a penalty?
While most know that linking to high authority sites does not make a site higher quality, the latest manual action recommendations have certainly made some site owners a little wary of linking to any site.
This question was asked today at Web Master Office Hours with John Mueller.
I've heard that there is a penalty if I don't link out from my domain to a different domain than any of my pages. It's true? Is not linking out from any page harmful?
I suspect this question came from the mass manual actions earlier this year in which many site owners were receiving unnatural outbound links, most of which were connected to bloggers linking to sites in exchange for money or other compensation. Many site owners decided to simply give nofollow on every link on the site – including internal links – as a solution, something Google said was not a great solution.
While Mueller said this is not correct, there was a bit of talk about the power of outbound links, but from a visitor's point of view.
No, that is not correct. So no, there is no penalty for not linking, which is definitely not the case. Obviously for users, sometimes it makes sense to provide references on other websites that they can visit to learn more about certain topics. So I think from a user experience point of view, it's probably a good idea to have links on pages, but just from a web spam point of view, from a Google indexing point of view, it's not necessary. put links on pages.
I think from a personal point of view, I really like seeing links to other pages as it really helps keep the website vibrant and people will visit other things from time to time and want to see different views for the same type. of information, something that would not be overlooked.
John Mueller also recently talked about how links to other sites influence the quality of a page in the eyes of Google. But it's one of those things where the site owner has to think from the user's perspective – if a visitor found the links helpful or useful, he would include them. But don't link to Wikipedia, simply because you think it's a ranking booster.
Source: TheSemPost
