<b>Adding outbound citations to 45 claims-heavy pages: trust signal or noise?</b>

<b>Adding outbound citations to 45 claims-heavy pages: trust signal or noise?</b>

Question: does citing authoritative external sources (a trust/E-E-A-T proxy) help the citing page itself, despite the old "don't leak link equity" folklore?

What was done: 45 statistics-heavy articles had every quantitative claim linked to a primary source (government data, peer-reviewed studies, original datasets) — averaging 7 new outbound citations per page. A matched 45-page set was left uncited.

Outcome over 11 weeks: the cited cohort improved 2.3 positions on average; the control 0.9. The differential (~1.4 positions) is modest but consistent across the cohort, not driven by a few outliers.

Caveat: adding citations usually means editors re-checked facts, so content quality plausibly rose alongside the links — we're partly measuring better editing. And outbound links to strong sources may shift user behavior signals too.

Method note: matched cohorts, one site, 11-week pre/post, per-page position deltas with outlier check.

Confidence: medium — controlled and consistent, but mechanism entangled with quality.

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Рядом обитают: @ProfileAutopsy (backlink audits)