External Links

External links may be used to link to another blog in the same niche as yours. You could just use it to link to an information source that you referenced in your post, or other resources to link to your articles, video, infographics, eBooks, and apps.

Benefits

I - Improve User Experience - You can use external links to improve the user experience of your website visitors.

For example, you wrote a blog post about affiliate marketing on your website without giving your readers any links to an affiliate program or network. Your readers will have to do a Google search for affiliate programs to join since you didn't recommend any for them.

But by including the links to recommended affiliate programs or networks, you have provided them with complete information. That's how you reward your visitors with links to valuable resources.

II - Build Credibility - The internet is filled with lots of valuable information covering every facet of human existence. You will find valuable thoughts, ideas, and words that were expressed by great men and women. But do you know that a lot of these people are not duly credited?

I've known this quote "Content is King" for as long as I can remember, but only got to find out that it was a phrase that originated from Bill Gates close to 25 years ago?

You can imagine my surprise because I have quoted this same phrase without knowing its origin. The reason it took me this long to find out was that the first person that mentioned the phrase never cited the original source.

Giving honor to those who deserve it is a great way of building credibility and trust with your audience. It's no use trying to sound like the smartest person in the room.

You can use external backlinks this way to show your readers the original source of thoughts and ideas referenced in your posts.

III - It is a healthy SEO practice that helps boost your search ranking, because Google doesn't only focus on backlinks for ranking but also gives some weight to external links.

IV - Relationship Builder - If you're in the habit of building external links for other people’s sites, you will get links in return.

That's because some receiving sites will link back to your site, and possibly make contact with you. This can be helpful for building a mutually beneficial relationship with others in your industry or niche.

Drawbacks

I - Some Linked Resources Going out of Existence - It is likely that one of the sites you link to may cease to exist, which might be because the domain expired, or the owner has moved on to a new project or probably has sold the website.

Any number of reasons could be responsible but your main concern is avoiding broken links, or removing them whenever they occur on your website.

II - Too Many Links - Having too many links may end up degrading the user experience of your visitors. Too many links, and you'll find that your readers are distracted from your original content.

III - Tendency to Take Your Visitors Away - It is common for visitors to click on external links to other sites. And they eventually end up not coming back to your website or content.

IV - Linking to Irrelevant Terms - This is a case of linking that might get you into trouble with the search engines, because anchor texts are used to establish context between linked pages and they must be relevant.

But linking that doesn't follow best practices is very likely to produce this kind of situation.