“I have a question. It’s a common practice among SEOs to believe that adding a total of 2-5 internal links and around 1-3 external links in a 1000-word blog post is beneficial. They also think that adding more links could be harmful to their site, while adding fewer links might not provide much value.
Could you please clarify whether the quantity of links really matters?”
Google’s John Mueller answered:
“Nobody at Google counts the links or the words on your blog posts, and even if they did, I’d still recommend writing for your audience.
I don’t know your audience, but I have yet to run across *anyone* who counts the words before reading a piece of content.”
Related: Google’s John Mueller discusses the practice of linking out to authoritative sites.
What Is The Right Answer?
Mueller recommends writing for the audience. The underlying idea there is that if you know what the audience wants then you know what to give them.
What the audience wants has nothing to do with the number of “entities” you add to your content or how many outbound links you have on the page. If that’s your approach to SEO then you may want to evaluate how much of what’s published is for search engines and how much of it is for users because creating content for search engines have always been the likeliest way to produce content that doesn’t catch on and ranks.
I’m not being a Google apologist either, this is the pragmatic approach for beating competitors by understanding what works. For example, years before the Reviews algorithm came out I consulted for clients who had review websites and I told them that they needed to add more original images, more hands-on reviews, more metrics and comparisons. So a couple years later when the Reviews update guidelines came out it all made sense because I knew from my own personal experience ranking my own review websites that this was the best approach.
So the right answer for most SEO questions is most often found by reframing the question around the people the content is created for. When it comes to outbound links the question shouldn’t be “how many outbound links is best for SEO?” the question should be “do these outbound links fit the context of what the web page and what a reader would want?”
A good context for adding an outbound link is when something is quoted or cited. For example, if the content mentions scientific research or what someone else said, then that research or the page page documenting what was said should be linked to. That’s what users would want, right?
Read the question and answer on LinkedIn.
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