In today’s webmaster office hours, John Mueller from Google was asked about how links on a page to other pages influence the quality of that linking page.  This is something that has been debated in recent years and now we often see people restrict linking from their webpages for “quality reasons.”

Do links within the page to other pages influence quality of that page? How can you tell that user found what he was looking for when he landed from serps, if the page contain links to other pages?

Sometimes links on a page can improve the quality of the page but I think that’s something where you wouldn’t want that to be seen as an artificial factor.  Just because there’s links on a page doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good.

We saw that way in the beginning when people would put links to Google or Wikipedia or CNN on their website and assume that search engines would be naive enough to think “oh, they’re linking to these well known websites, therefore the content itself must be good.”  And that’s definitely not the case.

You can add value to the website by adding links on those pages but its not the case that just because you have links, we’ll suddenly see your website as being higher quality.

So again, it seems to come back to the user.  Add quality links if it is going to increase the value, but don’t add them for the sake of adding them, especially if you are following SEO advice from ten or so years ago.  If they are useful to the user, add them, but if you think their only value is to Google, it won’t add a perceived instant positive quality signal to your site.