Spammy links and normal links tend to form communities with their linking patterns. While spammy pages may link to normal pages, normal pages rarely link to spammy pages. This creates a map of the Internet that makes it easier to find linking patterns between normal pages, while rejecting the spam links.
If the sites you link to have spammy outbound links, then maybe you should reconsider linking out to those sites.
The point is that low quality sites link to normal sites. And normal sites don’t tend to link to low quality sites. This is the directional quality of outbound links which was discovered in 2007 as a way to unmask spam sites and help confirm normal sites by their outbound links (PDF on Archive.org). Even though that research paper is old, the insight about the directional quality of outbound links may still be pertinent today.
Google uses an AI system called SpamBrain to discover spammy links, so it’s not inconceivable that directionality of outbound links is one of many considerations for determining spammy sites and networks of spammy sites.
Google’s documentation says this about SpamBrain, the spam fighting AI:
“Links still help us discover and rank results in meaningful ways, and we made a lot of progress in 2021 to protect this core signal. We launched a link spam update to broadly identify unnatural links and prevent them from affecting search quality.”
And elsewhere this:
“SpamBrain is our AI-based spam-prevention system. Besides using it to detect spam directly, it can now detect both sites buying links, and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links.”
5. Linking To .Edu and .Gov Sites Makes No Difference
Linking out to .edu and .gov pages is ok as long as it meets the information needs of the reader at the moment they come across the link.
Some people believe that linking to .gov and .edu pages helps rankings. This idea has been around since the very early 2000s.
Googlers have consistently debunked the idea that that .gov and .edu pages have a special ranking benefit.
There is no patent or research that explicitly or implicitly says that sites with links from .edu and .gov sites are considered higher quality.
The entire idea is pure conjecture.
Outbound Links And Modern SEO
AI, neural networks and transformer based systems like BERT have changed how search engines detect site quality and links. This means that old practices related to outbound links should be reconsidered.
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