diamondgrl - 2:10 am on Sep 18, 2004 (gmt 0)

I will second Doug10's seconding of my remarks. I see the claims and despite Vadim's one test, I don't see the evidence for the idea that solid outbound links will either increase your PR or increase your ranking in the SERPs.

I'm not saying it's impossible or even highly unlikely, I just don't see any logic for it, much less evidence. Vadim's speculation about Google's motives makes little sense to me. If you are a spammer, you would simply do what Google wants and not worry if you are linking elsewhere or producing your content in Chinese or whatever it takes to make a buck. Why would linking elsewhere produce evidence of your seriousness? If you're Amazon, you don't have to link elsewhere to get great PR and SERPs. Nor does Google (given that its SERPs pages are not spidered and are PR0, there aren't an abundance of outbound links I've seen). Nor does Microsoft and any number of other PR9 or PR10 sites.

My main site doesn't link elsewhere and it would make no sense for me to do so from a user's standpoint. How would that show my seriousness to the integrity of my site's purpose if I created outbound links to web sites when it made no sense to the users? In fact, the more I think of it, none of the various web sites I have created have a natural purpose for outbound links except my personal home page. I can't see why that makes them more spammy (in fact they are anything but) or less worthy of being in the SERPs.

Anybody have more solid evidence or at least a logical explanation why someone in Googleland might think it was a worthy criteria to include?