Outbound Links

Outbound links are links from your website to pages on other domains. They are the counterpart to backlinks: where backlinks are other people's recommendations of you, outbound links are your recommendations of others. Together with internal links they make up a site's full link profile.

In practice, outbound links are mostly source references. A guide on pensions links to the tax authority's rules, or a claim cites the study behind the number. References like that make content more usable, because the reader can go straight to the source, and they show search engines which sources a page keeps company with.

Markup belongs to the term. Google requires links a site has been paid for to carry rel="sponsored", and links the publisher does not want to lend authority to can carry nofollow. The attributes state what kind of recommendation is on the table and release the site from vouching for the target.

The old SEO worry about leaking authority off the site still circulates, but it belongs more to forum lore than to reality. Good source references are a quality signal, and a page with no outbound links at all can read as closed and self-referential. The same holds in AI search, where language models weigh whether claims carry sources and whether those sources hold up.