External Link

Detailed explanation

External links send visitors and crawlers away from your site to another domain — a citation, a source, a partner site, or a tool you are recommending. They are the flip side of inbound links: when you link out to another site, you are the one passing a small authority and traffic signal to them, in the same way sites linking to you pass one to you.

Despite an old myth, linking out to relevant, high-quality sources does not hurt SEO and can actually support content credibility, part of E-E-A-T signals, by showing you are citing legitimate sources rather than making unsupported claims. The practical concerns are more about UX and control: whether a link should open in a new tab so you do not lose the visitor, whether it should carry a nofollow or sponsored attribute, particularly for paid or unvetted links, and making sure external links do not lead to broken or low-quality pages over time.

For “what is an external link” or “does linking out hurt SEO” searches, this entry is a starting point. See Internal Link for the site-side counterpart and Anchor Text for how the link text itself factors into relevance.