Linking to other sites is super important, but you need to choose the right sites in case you want to improve your rankings, which you want to do. The context of the page you’re linking to is one consideration you should have.
Having some semantic relevance sometimes happens, and you may link one thing to something similar, but the thing is, you need to look at the semantic relations, and don’t use them as an excuse for a bad link.
When you do link, ideally it should be a similar match to the paragraph that has the link that you want to have reference to the page. This is called the context of the link. Images in links or words around the images and outbound links are being used to define these, not just the anchor text. The exact match between the context of the paragraph and the link from a linked site usually means a good match for both of these.
What you need to make sure that you do with outbound links, is that make sure they are for normal websites, and the sites linked to should have normal inbound links that don’t look paid. You shouldn’t use spammy and scraper links. You should make sure to not have poor quality content, and also make sure that you look at the link patterns so you know what to get involved with, though this can get tricky judging from the other sites since many successful sites tend to get low-quality random links out of this.
Outbound links can be used to help others understand what the webpage is about, and this is a good way to tell others a bit more about it, and it will help Google trust your site.
However, outbound links don’t validate your page. You want to make sure that you use them to define your site is a quality site, but you should get links that look normal. Normal sites linking to normal, and spam linking to normal is normal, but normal sites linking to spam are not.
You should make sure that when you do use an outbound link, you consider the context being linked to, and look at the inbound links, but also making sure that the site that you link to isn’t spam.
All three of these factors play an important role in the ultimate future of your site, and how it looks in rankings.
So yes, you need to make sure that you consider your outbound and inbound link context, and make sure to not make it look spammy. Links are very important, and you want relevant, trusted sites, but not also those who are spammy in order to ensure that you’re getting the best in terms of content for your site. Doing this makes a huge difference in the future of your links, and the overall state of what your links will get from this now, and in the future rankings and actions too.
