steveb - 9:44 pm on Sep 16, 2003 (gmt 0)

"I'm considering the effect of outgoing links, not of any kind of reciprocal links."

Which is why your statement continues to be totally innaccurate and you should stop confusing people.

In the example novasoft is linking to pages that directly link back to him. Ignoring that is not just bad, it's bizarre.

It's 100% innacurate to say outbound links decrease PR. A link is a link. If it links to one of your own pages that links back to you, or if it links to a page on another domain that links back to you does not matter.

Novasoft creating one page that links to all these pages that link back to novasoft's domain will benefit his/her domain in exactly the same way as if those pages were on his/her domain. Likely the effect will actually be greater because those off domain pages will have their own link(s) coming to them and having at least two links to a page instead of one makes it far more likely that page won't be missed by the Google crawl.

"Outgoing links decrease PR" continues to be probably the most complete bit of nonsense posted here. It is not true, period. *Bad* linking decreases PR, whether it is outgoing linking that returns nothing to you, or linking to your own dead end pages.

Bottom line, having a "crawl page" of links to pages that link to you is good webmastering for other reasons, but also will work to increase your PR (microscopically) in the same way that internal linking can.