On the one hand, the results of this study can tell us that outgoing links do influence the position of a page. On the other hand, the search terms in the study were brand new and the website’s content was themed around medicine and pharmaceuticals. Therefore, there is a high probability that this query could be classified as YMYL. Google has stated the importance of E-A-T for YMYL websites several times. Therefore, outgoing links may be considered an E-A-T signal , proving that the page has factually accurate content.
As for normal queries (not YMYL), John Mueller has said many spain mobile database times that you don’t have to be afraid to link to external sources from your content because outgoing links are good for your users.
Additionally, outgoing links can also be beneficial for SEO because Google AI may take them into account when filtering spam. Because spam pages tend to have few outgoing links (if any). They either link to pages under the same domain (if they ever consider SEO) or contain only paid links. So if you link to some reliable resources, it shows Google that your page is not a spam page.
There used to be a notion that Google could give you a manual penalty for having too many outgoing links, but John Mueller says that this is only possible when the outgoing links are clearly part of some link exchange scheme, combined with generally poor site quality .
Google's battle against spammy links
As long as PageRank has existed, SEOs have found new ways to manipulate it.