Every website has outbound links. Some websites have outbound links connecting to different webpages. Many websites have outbound links redirecting users to other sites. These sites could be a part of the same network or it can be a third party website. Webmasters often need to link to sources or references and hence outbound links become necessary. Given the nature of search engine optimization as it has evolved into, outbound links play an important role in ranking. Google in particular recognizes the quality of outbound links and this influences the ranking. This is where outbound links metric becomes significant for webmasters and search engine optimization experts.

Outbound links metric is simply the assessment of the quality and size of the profile of a particular website. How many outbound links are there on a webpage and subsequently on a website, the quality of these links as in how they are used including the deployment of keywords, the types of sites these links redirect the visitors to and the specific difference between a dofollow and nofollow tag get assessed and accordingly a rating or metric is assigned to the profile of outbound links for a website. This metric can be used as a guide to improve or change the outbound links strategy. The metric does not reflect the actual website ranking on Google or other major search engines.

Outbound links can have a dofollow or nofollow tag. A dofollow tag means that search engines will recognize the website that is being linked to and that site will get the benefit of having an inbound link or backlink. This helps the ranking of that website. A nofollow tag means search engines will not recognize the website that users are being redirected to and hence that site will not get the benefit of having an inbound link. A nofollow outbound link can hamper the ranking of the site where it is on and hence it is not a sound strategy for the long run. Dofollow and nofollow tags do not influence the outbound links metric in search engine optimization.