External Link (Outbound)
A link from your page out to somebody else's site.
Analogy Mental model
The reference list at the end of a paper. Citing strong sources strengthens the paper; citing nothing makes the reader wonder where the numbers came from.
In practice What you actually do
Link the claims that need support to the primary source: the statistics agency, the study, the documentation. Open them in a new tab so the reader keeps the page they were on. Two well-chosen citations do more for credibility than twenty decorative ones.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Linking to spam, to a competitor's purchase page, or to something unrelated to the sentence costs trust on both sides. The old habit of hoarding link equity through nofollow is obsolete; the reader's next click still matters.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →