Many people don’t like to link out to other sites – they’re afraid they’ll lose their traffic to competitors, or that linking will decrease user engagement. So they either don’t link at all, or link only to “noncompetitors”, or only in a new window.

Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 disagrees – he’s a bit of an evangelist on the benefits of linking. And he has a new blog post up on the top news sites (by sessions and time per person) – at the top of both lists is drudgereport.com, a news aggregator that exists solely by linking and does pretty well at it. According to Karp, this is more proof that linking out can only help you.

What’s your site’s policy on linking out? And what’s your perspective as a reader?