Do external links help SEO?

[Marc van Leeuwen]

Some sites like Wikipedia getting top position on search engines. Why?

While they are having tons of external links, why don't they affect to SEO?

 

[SEOPub]

I think you might be confusing "external links" with "outbound links" in your question.

 

[UVM]

There is nothing wrong with having outbound links and sites like wikipedia use a rel=nofollow which is the best practice if you are going to have tons of links. If you think about it linking to relevant content and citing your sources is the very foundation of the internet.

 

[ellys]

WWW is a collection of links, so is fair to link to others website. You can tagged them with Nofollow if you want.

 

[Miguelito203]

Wikipedia is an authority site for a number of reasons. First of all, tons of people use the site. It is like the modern-day encyclopedia. Secondly, tons of people link to the site. When people want to look up something, a lot of them use Wikipedia. It's the leader in what it does -- like of like how Walmart is the largest retail chain in the world. The last I heard, something like 70% of the entire United States population shops there.

Joey