Google's John Mueller said again that linking out to high authority web sites does not help you rank better in Google. He said "no" when asked if it is true based on what this graphic says, which is "multiple SEO experiments and studies show that linking out to high-quality resources is correlated with higher rankings."
Here are the tweets:
No
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) December 29, 2019
Now, this is not the first time John or Google has said this. Here are more times:
- Google Reminder: Linking To High Authority Web Sites Do Not Help With SEO
- Google: There Isn't An SEO Advantage To Linking Externally
- Google: Outbound Links Are Not A Ranking Factor
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update: More from John:
Sure, sure. People have been linking to Wikipedia, CNN, etc for decades now, in the hope that their low-quality pages are suddenly seen as being high-quality. That's not how you make high-quality content.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) January 2, 2020
Update in 2023: John Mueller of Google said this again in a Reddit thread:
Nothing happens. Why should it? This has been one of those things that SEOs have claimed / hoped since literally decades."Here's my affiliate site about handbags - and here's a link to CNN & Wikipedia, please take me seriously now, k?"
Treat links like content. Does this link provide additional, unique value to users? Then link naturally. Is this link irrelevant to my users? Then don't link to it. Name-dropping a dictionary doesn't fix your speling mistakes.
Adding...
I think we've said this since forever. It was a myth in the early 2000's. It's not like people will blow up the internet if they link to CNN or Wikipedia or Apple too often, so on the list of myths that need to be dispelled, it's pretty far down. And of course, the more Google says it's not so, the more people believe it must be true.
