Google’s John Mueller’s first #AskGoogleWebmasters launched Friday afternoon and was on the question of does linking to other websites help or hurt SEO? This is a question he was asked and answered several times over the years, see below…

The whole video, with the intro and ending was less than two minutes – so these short clips are nice.

The short answer was that linking out can be helpful to your users but don’t do it for link exchanges, ads or spammy comment reasons – in those cases, nofollow the link. Otherwise, linking out can add value and more context. He didn’t specifically say if it helps or hurts your SEO.

Here is the transcript:

So if we go into our archives, John Mueller basically said, no, external links do not directly help your SEO or hurt it. Here are some articles we wrote on this topic:

Google: Outbound Links Are Not A Ranking Factor
Google: There Isn’t An SEO Advantage To Linking Externally
Google Comments Again On External Links & Ranking Benefit
Study Says Outbound Links Helps Google Rankings, Despite What Google Says

Forum discussion at Twitter.