Digital Growth Day: September 18, 2014 A KICK-ASS OUTBOUND LINK AUDIT: HOW TO IMPROVE SEO & SHOW YOUR READERS A GOOD TIME It’s important to audit and monitor your outbound links to make sure they serve a real purpose, while also keeping Google happy. Kit Nicols, DeepCrawl

1. A Kick-Ass Outbound Link Audit
How to Improve Links and Show Your Readers a Good Time
@KitNicols
kit@deepcrawl.com

2. What is an outbound link?

3. What is an outbound link audit?
“Ensuring that your site provides useful information to visitors – not just
with the content itself, but also with the content your links endorse.”
What does it involve?
- Performing technical checks of external links
- Performing editorial checks
- Auditing old content
- Futureproofing ongoing content

4. Why do I need to do one?
You may be misleading visitors, sending
them to broken pages or interrupting their
online journey. They can’t trust your site.
Search engines may be associating you with
low quality/spam sites. They won’t see you
as credible.
Outbound link audit = being seen as
authoritative and trustworthy by your
visitors...helping with engagement.
Outbound link audit = search engines
see you only provide quality, relevant
sources…helping with credibility

5. What do my links mean for SEO?
Your Site
Travel Deals
Stationery
Sports News
Fashion Blog

6. What do my links mean for SEO?
Your Site
Sky Scanner
Debenhams
Holiday Shop
Travel Blog
Lonely Planet

7. Steps to Take – Technical Checks
Follow/No Follow
- Comment/forum links
- Paid links/affiliate links – including links in guest posts
- Embedded items (such as widgets etc)
- Off topic sources that you want to link to
<href=http://www.site.com>Do follow</a>
<href=http://www.site.com rel=“nofollow”>No follow</a>
Remove Links to…
- Malware infected sites (your site is a risk to users). Run
a malware check on external domains.
- Broken links (you’re ending a user journey). Scan for
these with a link checking tool
Redirect Chains
- Don’t send visitors (or search engines) on a messy
journey trying to follow a link you’ve recommended
- If links you’ve recommended change, you could end
up forcing visitors through a redirect loop

8. Helpful Tools
Who does Google associate me with?

9. Helpful Tools
Where can I find my outbound links?

10. Steps to Take – Editorial Checks
Are your links for
humans or robots?

11. Steps to Take – Editorial Checks
Are your links for
humans or robots?
- Is your anchor text engaging? Don’t use exact match unless it makes
sense, and don’t just link to the URL
- Are you linking to spam sites? If you’ve done reciprocal linking in the
past, spam links can still exist
- Have you got too many links on a page? This fluctuates depending on
the content…but consider a ‘reasonable number’ for your page

12. Where are you placing outbound links?
Nav bar?
In content?
Sidebar?
Footer?
Sitewide?

13. Steps to Take – Ongoing Content
Futureproofing your site
- Read the whole page you’re linking to - don’t rely on the headline. Is the
information on the external page correct, trustworthy and contextual?
- Does the content on the external page add anything to your argument? If not, your
readers may just bounce back to the search results.
- Don’t stuff your anchor text with keywords. Use natural language that encourages
people to click through. But please, for the love of SEO, never use ‘click here’ or
‘read more’.
- Set your links to open in a new window. This ensures that readers can enjoy the
external content without leaving your website.

14. Discussion
How many links are too many links?
“We dropped the 100 links per page guideline
– but we may take action if it is too spammy”
Matt Cutts
Is there a ‘ratio’? What’s your best practise?

15. Activity time!

16. Helpful Links
- http://blog.deepcrawl.co.uk/blog/updates/kick-ass-outbound-link-audit
- http://webdesign.about.com/od/beginningtutorials/qt/external-links.htm
- https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1136920?hl=en-GB
- http://moz.com/blog/the-role-of-outbound-links
- http://www.shoutmeloud.com/seo-benefits-and-tips-for-outbound-links.html
- http://searchenginewatch.com/topic/outbound_link
@KitNicols kit@deepcrawl.com