ogletree - 3:41 am on Oct 3, 2004 (gmt 0)

The original poster is not confused they are asking a legit question. As for the person who brought PR into this that has nothing to do with this. Linking out does have SEO value but you can do the same thing by just pointing the links into your own site. If you want to rank for blue widgets and you have 10 links on your page to other sites or internal pages (it does not matter) you will rank better for blue widgets on the page with the links. It is a small factor and is just a fancier way of doing kw density. This works better than just kw density. If you have 80 links that is even better than 10 links. It is not pretty but it does help a little specially for medium traffic terms. This is one of the reasons that directories seem to do so well. If you have a directory page about blue widgets then if you have 20 listing with different headings that all have the same root (blue widgets) then that page will rank better for blue widgets. I have seen sitemap pages do this as well. Add blue widgets to the title and an h1 tag and one or two anchor text backlinks and you are number one for some medium traffic terms. Of course it works wonders on the easier to get terms.

If you already have a page that is ranking page one or two and you alrady have pretty good kw density try linking those pages to some of your other internal pages that share the same kw root. See if you move up some.