The inspiration we got for this test comes from a competitor’s site. This particular site is ranking top 3 with a much lower domain and page authority than the competition. On analyzing their page, they were spamming internal links by repeatedly linking back to the page itself. Is this a SEO hack we could use? We test that.
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If you recall, we’ve done work with authority outbound links. So the idea of linking out to Wikipedia or .govs. What we found there is that having a link on a page is better than not having and having a few is better than just having a one but you can have too many outbound authority links on a page what we happen to run is just doing it with regular links. What about just having an outbound link to a page? So that is what Ryan is doing on this set up.
This page right here has 0 outbound links, then 1, 5, 10, and 20 and they are not going to an authority site. The initial line up was 20, 5, 10, 0, and 1 and then as the serps shifted a little bit and as they were recrawled, we got 5,10, 20, 0, 1, and then they finally settle down here to 5, 10, 20, 0, and 1.
This lines up almost exactly with what we saw with the authority outbound links. You probably want one. In this case, the 0 did I guess beat it so take that for what it is but having some on the page looks like a really good idea, same with the authority outbound links, having some links on the page seem like a good idea and having one seems like a good idea but you can go to far.
Once you get to that 10 or that 20, that is probably too many. I think it is still a good idea when you are doing your on page to sprinkle a bit out outbound link and having a good internal linking is always a good idea. We are talking about links that are in the body here. So not necessarily sidebar links, navigation links, or footer links but links that are in the content of what you are trying to rank.