External OutLinks are links that occur on a webpage that point to URL on a different domain.

External OutLinks are also called Backlinks, and are what analytics platforms call referral traffic when a user accesses your site using them. 

Why Are External OutLinks Important?

One of the primary reasons to look at External OutLinks in a crawl report is to be sure that pages are not deemed to be link farms.

Link Farms are an old optimization concept where a page would serve as a directory, listing links to tons of sites, while having little to any meaningful actual content on the pages.

SEOs would obtain links from them as a workaround for their backlink strategy, until Google & other search engines began to punish them.

If you have a page that has too many links:written content, your URL may be deemed poor & be ranked worse in search, if at all.

Additionally, having too many pages like this on a site can lead to an entire domain penalty.

As a result, it is important to always check this metric in your crawl reports to be sure that everything looks ok.