lammert - 6:47 pm on Jan 18, 2006 (gmt 0)

... and was deliberatley not using site wide links as an experiment to see if they would hold their PR during jagger and now bigdaddy.

A page will not loose PR when linking out to other pages. As mentioned before, at least one link is necessary from each page to prevent PR waste. However, the pagerank of a page will be shared between the pages it links too and the more links on a page, the more the PR value distributed via each link will be dilluted.

Be carefull with many index pages, sitemaps etc. I have done some simulations with page rank distributions in a site with different internal linking schemes and I found it astonishing how many PR a sitemap consumes when it is linked to by all pages, often more than 15%. This is waste of PR in most cases because sitemaps and index directories won't show up in most queries because of lack of relevance.