synergy - 6:03 pm on Nov 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

Also, on a related front, do you feel that outbound links to relevant (tightly themed) sites help both pages rank well for kw's related to those two pages?

A few weeks after Florida and loosing all rankings, as an experiment, I decided to link out only to broadly related super-authority sites from my index page. A week later, I was ranked with or above the super authority sites for the kw combo "business 2 business". My site is a broad match to this kw (never targeted and not normally ranked).

In addition, "business 2 business" was nowhere to be found in my site (not just the index page).

This proved that G was ranking my site based on a broad-theme-match from the outgoing links on my index page.

As soon as the links were removed, my ranking was removed from this keyword combo. I've not been able to duplicate this since update Austin. Now, it seems the more I link out to important and useful information, the less it affects my ranking status.

But alas, it helps my visitors and that's all that matters... right? :)