Linking Out is Good or Bad for Your Page SEO?

Recently John Mueller was asked an interesting question was is linking out good or bad for SEO? And what he replied in a short way in a #AskGoogleWebmasters was quite interesting.

He accepted that if you have a link to the other side, it needs to be valuable for the users to find solutions for his query. Google crawler considers these links to identify the source of your information on your page, and as per the user’s question, it shows your page to the users. Google is ok with it.

But John also accepts that if you have following link arrangement like below

A.    You link me. I will give you link back
B.     Advertisement
C.    Linking in comments

Make sure this should use rel no follow the link because it may be useful for users. But not helpful in terms of information for users.

As per the summary of his discussion, yes it helps you but if it is helpful for the user in related to his query and information available on the page. But if it is a kind of arrangement mentioned above you should tell the bot not to follow those links and these links must be specified with rel no-follow tag.

Beware with link scheme it may be harmful and hurt your SEO.

As per Google, you should be aware of a link scheme. It may hurt your SEO. Very soon we have an article for this to update you.