A sourcing standard for outbound citations on an evidence page

A sourcing standard for outbound citations on an evidence page

The question: when your article cites sources, are those citations doing trust work, or are they decorative links that a rater would discount?

The QRG rewards content that demonstrates its claims, and it treats accuracy as central to trustworthiness. A sourcing standard that makes citations function as evidence:

— Cite the primary source, not an intermediary. If you learned a statistic from a news article, find and link the original dataset or study the article drew from.
— Cite the specific location: a section, a table, a page — not a homepage. A homepage citation is unverifiable and reads as padding.
— Prefer sources a rater is instructed to trust: peer-reviewed work, official statistics bodies, primary documents, recognized expert organizations.
— Quote precisely when the exact wording is load-bearing, and represent the source's actual claim, not a stronger version of it.
— Date the source and note when its currency matters; a 2009 figure presented as current is an accuracy failure.
— Where a claim has genuine dispute, cite the counter-source too. Selective citation is a trust liability under scrutiny.

Caveat: outbound citation quality is not a confirmed direct ranking factor, and Google has historically been noncommittal about external links as a signal. The case for rigorous citation rests on accuracy and reviewability — both of which the QRG explicitly weighs — not on a documented link-out boost.

What we still don't know: whether algorithmic systems assess the quality of cited sources at all, or whether citation rigor influences only human raters and the readers who decide whether to trust and reference your page.