The idea that linking out from your website leaks SEO authority has been around for decades. It’s wrong. Here’s what’s actually happening when you hoard your PageRank like it’s a money bin.
Picture Scrooge McDuck. That enormous vault. The coins stacked to the ceiling. The daily swim. The manic grin.
Now picture the average approach to outbound links on a business website. Same energy.
The idea that linking out from your site leaks SEO authority has been floating around the industry for years. Decades, actually. And despite Google doing its level best to explain why it doesn’t work, plenty of marketers are still making decisions based on it. Refusing to link out. Slapping nofollow attributes on everything that moves. Treating every outbound link like a gold coin they can’t afford to lose.
It doesn’t work. It never really did. And in some cases, it’s actively hurting your rankings.
What is PageRank and why does everyone get it wrong?
PageRank is Google’s term for the SEO authority a page accumulates, largely through the backlinks pointing at it. Think of it as a score. The more authoritative sites linking to you, the higher your score. And that score flows through your site via your internal links, passing a little authority from page to page every time you link somewhere.
The idea of sculpting that PageRank (directing it like water through pipes, only letting it flow to the pages you care most about) isn’t entirely mad on the surface. If you have a pool of authority sitting on your homepage, of course you’d want to direct it towards the pages you want to rank.
The problem is that Google changed the rules on this a long time ago. And most people still haven’t noticed.
The nofollow trap
This is where Scrooge really goes wrong.
The nofollow attribute was introduced back in 2005. Add it to a link and you’re essentially telling Google: I can’t vouch for where this is going, don’t pass any authority through here. Useful for comment sections, paid links or genuinely sketchy URLs you’ve had to reference for some reason.
What it was never meant to be is a PageRank sculpting tool. But that’s exactly how a lot of SEOs started using it. The logic was: if I nofollow the links I don’t want to count, all that authority must flow to the links I do want to count.
Google closed that particular loophole years ago. Here’s what actually happens now.
Say your page has 10 units of SEO authority and 10 outgoing links. If you nofollow five of them, hoping the other five each pick up a double share – they don’t. The nofollowed links still absorb some of that authority. It just evaporates instead of going anywhere useful. You haven’t redirected the authority. You’ve destroyed it.
“Nofollow went from a way to redirect PageRank to a way that just discards it.”
Google’s former head of web spam Matt Cutts wrote about this back in 2009 – and it remains as relevant now as it was then. His recommendation? “In general, I would let page rank flow freely within your site.” Simple advice. Still routinely ignored.
So what happens when you refuse to link out at all?
This is the full Scrooge McDuck move. No outbound links. No sharing of any authority whatsoever.
The vault is sealed.
Here’s the thing: a huge proportion of websites are already doing exactly this. According to research by Backlinko, 94% of all pages online have zero external links pointing out from them. Zero. Which means the bar for standing out is actually quite low – and the sites that do link out to quality sources are immediately signalling something different about themselves.
94% of pages online have zero external links
Google doesn’t just reward sites for what they contain. It also pays attention to who they’re willing to vouch for. Matt Cutts said it plainly back in 2009, and Google’s John Mueller echoed it in the inaugural Ask Google session in 2019: “Linking to other websites is a great way to provide value to your users. Oftentimes, links help users to find out more, to check out your sources, and to better understand how your content is relevant to the questions that they have.”
And it’s only become more important since.
Google’s March 2025 Core Update explicitly targeted uncited and unverifiable claims – sites that demonstrate source diligence, by actually linking to what they’re referencing, gained visibility as a result. Citing your sources isn’t just good journalism. It’s increasingly good SEO.
Refusing to link out doesn’t protect your authority. It just makes your site look like it’s hiding something.
My approach – and the one I’d recommend – is simple. If you mention something and you’d genuinely send a reader there, link to it. Don’t overthink it. Don’t nofollow it out of paranoia. Just link.
The experiment that proved it
If you’re someone who needs actual data before changing anything – fair enough. Have a look at this study by Reboot Online, which is about as close to a controlled experiment as the SEO world gets.
Their team set up 10 brand new domains, all with articles of comparable structure and length, all targeting a made-up word so that nothing outside the experiment could influence the results. Five of the sites included outbound links to Oxford University, Cambridge University and the Genome Research Institute. Five didn’t. Then they watched what happened.
The sites with outbound links consistently outranked the ones without. The experiment was repeated in 2020 with fresh domains and produced the same results.
Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz and SparkToro, reviewed the study before publication and called it “as close to ‘proof’ as we get in the SEO world” – which, in an industry that runs on correlation and gut feeling, is about as ringing an endorsement as you’ll find.
And the data from the wild backs it up too. An Orbit Media study of pages ranking in Google’s top 10 found a median of 19 external outbound links per page. The middle 50% had between 5 and 42. Pages that refuse to link out aren’t the norm among high-ranking content. They’re the exception.
What should I focus on instead?
If PageRank sculpting is a distraction, where should your attention go? Three places, in order of importance:
- Site architecture. Make sure authority can flow naturally from your strongest pages to your most important ones. Your homepage typically gets the most backlinks. What is it linking to? Are your core service or product pages reachable in one or two clicks, or buried four levels down?
- Internal linking done properly. If you have a page that’s already ranking and getting traffic, it has real authority of its own. Use it. Link from that page to others you want to push up. This is one of the most underused tactics in SEO – and one of the most effective.
- Content that earns links in the first place. This is what Cutts called the ‘first order’ recommendation. No amount of internal sculpting matters much if you’re not attracting authority from outside your site. Build content worth linking to – genuinely useful, specific, trustworthy – and the authority compounds over time. For a deeper look at what moves the needle, our guide to SEO ranking factors is worth a read alongside this.
The through-line is the same across all three: stop trying to outsmart the system, and start building something the system wants to reward.
The bottom line
Outbound links are not the enemy. Nofollow isn’t a PageRank redirector. And treating your website like a money bin – hoarding every last drop of authority, diving through the coins alone – doesn’t make you richer. It just means you’re swimming in something nobody else can see.
Link out to good stuff. Build a clear site structure. Create content that earns real backlinks. That’s the playbook.
Ready to stop swimming in circles?
If your SEO feels like it’s going nowhere – or you’re not sure whether what you’re currently doing is actually helping – let’s have a look. At Wrise, we offer SEO packages from just £99/month, with no contracts and no setup fees. We cover everything from technical SEO and site architecture to content that builds real authority – the kind that compounds over time. Get your free SEO review →
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Written by Rob Truslove
Rob is the founder of Wrise and a specialist in SEO and search strategy. He has over 15 years’ experience helping more than 500 brands grow their online visibility and performance.
With an academic background in creative writing and storytelling, Rob combines narrative-led content with data-driven search strategy to help websites rank, engage and convert. Over his career, he has worked with household brands including P&O, The AA, Trevor Sorbie and Purple Bricks, as well as ambitious SMEs looking to scale quickly.
