To be fair, John Mueller has openly stated that outbound links aren't “specifically a ranking factor,” while adding that they “can add value to your content and that can be relevant to us in search. ". In the context of the Reboot Online study and Matt Cutts' statement, this could be interpreted to mean that the inclusion of citations builds trust in the content, rather than to mean that outbound links have no effect. Either way, good quality content is a must if you want to be taken seriously – which can have a positive, albeit indirect, effect on rankings. 5. Poor internal linking structure There's more than one right way to structure your links, but there are
plenty of wrong ways to do it as well. Let's start with the basics. As Google's guidelines state: Build your site with a logical link structure. Each page must be accessible from at least one static text link. Your typical modern content management system will jewelry retouching service usually handle at least that automatically. But this feature is sometimes broken. A dangerous myth is that you are supposed to funnel multiple page articles to the first page. In reality, you should either leave pretty much alone or canonicalize on a single page with the full message. This also applies to archives and similar pages. Canonicalizing
these pages may remove the links from these pages from the search index. Completely flat link architecture is another common problem. Some take the idea that every page should be accessible via links a bit too far, including links to virtually every page on the site in the navigation. From the user's perspective, this creates obvious problems by making it very difficult to locate the appropriate pages. But this confusion carries over to search engines and how they interpret your site. Without a clear hierarchy, search engines have a hard time analyzing which pages on your site are most important, which pages cover which topics, etc.