diamondgrl - 3:44 am on Sep 17, 2004 (gmt 0)

The fact is, nobody except the insiders know how the whole Google ranking system works, but the original PageRank formula is published and well known. It is based exclusively on the quality and the quantity of the inbound links, not the outbound links.

While there are no doubt many variations that have been made to this basic formula by now, it does not strike me as the least bit sensical to reward folks who willy-nilly link out to Google, Amazon, Yahoo, etc. No sense whatsoever.

In fact, according to this formula, all you are doing is diluting your overall site's ranking by letting PageRank "leak" out to other sites rather than using it to shore up other pages on your site.

There are many many myths and voodoo about search engine practices. As far as I'm concerned, this is one of them unless someone comes up with hard data on the matter.