Outbound link count on guest post pages, where does it stop being worth it

Guest post pages often carry a long list of outbound links, sometimes 15 or 20 in one article. When people vet sites they usually look at DR and traffic, and the number of other links sharing the page with yours rarely comes up.
My assumption is that past a certain count your link is just one of a crowd and passes very little. Not sure anyone has tested it properly though, and I can't tell where the line would sit, or whether it matters more for contextual body links than for author box or footer ones.
Has anyone tried comparing placements with few outbound links against crowded ones on similar sites? Do you set a limit when you pick a page, and do you check it on the actual article or only on the site level numbers?

i wouldn't use 15 or 20 as a hard cutoff. i'd look at the actual article rather than just the site's dr. there's a big difference between 20 links pointing to useful sources and 20 random commercial links stuffed into a post. i'd also check if the page gets any real traffic and whether the link fits naturally into the content. personally, i'd be more interested in a relevant body link than one buried in an author bio. are those crowded pages mostly linking to related sites?

Ayanseo said:

Guest post pages often carry a long list of outbound links, sometimes 15 or 20 in one article. When people vet sites they usually look at DR and traffic, and the number of other links sharing the page with yours rarely comes up.
My assumption is that past a certain count your link is just one of a crowd and passes very little. Not sure anyone has tested it properly though, and I can't tell where the line would sit, or whether it matters more for contextual body links than for author box or footer ones.
Has anyone tried comparing placements with few outbound links against crowded ones on similar sites? Do you set a limit when you pick a page, and do you check it on the actual article or only on the site level numbers?

Click to expand...

it is not certain that there is a specific point after which the page would no longer be useful.however i would rather be worried about pages with forced links or articles whose sole purpose seems to be the sale of pllacement. the former could even be useless despite having a few good links while the latter would make complete sense.

Ayanseo said:

Guest post pages often carry a long list of outbound links, sometimes 15 or 20 in one article. When people vet sites they usually look at DR and traffic, and the number of other links sharing the page with yours rarely comes up.
My assumption is that past a certain count your link is just one of a crowd and passes very little. Not sure anyone has tested it properly though, and I can't tell where the line would sit, or whether it matters more for contextual body links than for author box or footer ones.
Has anyone tried comparing placements with few outbound links against crowded ones on similar sites? Do you set a limit when you pick a page, and do you check it on the actual article or only on the site level numbers?

Click to expand...

i would compare the pages as opposed to sticking to a set limit. while a guest blog post that has some real references may be complettely natural, having five links that seem like mere commercial placements may be suspicious. it is the intention behind writing the article that counts the most for me.

I dont think theres a fixed number for this. Relevance matters more to me, but if a page has 20+ outbound links and most of them look paid, thats a red flag.

I usually check the actual page, not just the site metrics. If an article has tons of outbound links, especially unrelated ones, that’s a red flag for me. I don’t think there’s a magic number, though. Relevance and how naturally your link fits matter more.

I once bought a guest post on a page with 17 outbound links. linda held's point about judging the article, not the DR, is where I landed. My link sat next to unrelated casino links.

for me 3-5 outbound links per post is fine, past 10 it’s basically a link farm. I also check if the site has real traffic to the guest post pages, not just the homepage

The count on your own page is the smaller half of it. Look at the site's last 10 published posts, not just the one you are buying -> if every article ships with 15 commercial links, the domain is a placement feed and your page inherits that, however clean your own article reads.

The thing almost nobody checks: whether the article gets internal links after it goes live. A tidy post with 3 outbound links that sits orphaned, linked from nothing, does less for you than a busier page that lives in a category feed and actually gets crawled back.

I only have one side of this, since we write the articles for our own network placements: we keep it to 2 outbound, the client plus one real reference. Not because of dilution math, but because a wall of paid anchors is what gets the whole site quietly devalued, and there is no notice for that and nothing to appeal.

So no fixed number on your end. If the article reads like it was written to sell the slots, skip it whatever the DR says.