Outbound links v pr drain

conflicting arguments

[newsparrot]

Outbound links lose PR?
I have a page for outbound and one for reciprocal links. Having looked at numerous posts on this can someone point me in the right direction as to which argument is correct.

Do I drain pr or not from the outbound page, or should I join the two pages and even it out?

[vitaplease]

Every page has its own Pagerank given by other pages linking towards it. It can donate that Pagerank (with a discount called dampening factor) through links to any other page. So you can let it flow diluted (by the amount of links) or less diluted, to any page you wish. Site internally and or externally.

Every extra link placed on a links page means less Pagerank pass-through for the other pages getting links from that link page (and that could be a site- internal page).

Do not forget to link out though. [webmasterworld.com]

[newsparrot]

vitaplease

thanks for that, I will read it slowly.. and try to sort my site out!

[ciml]

It's worth noting that the raw PageRank lost from outbound links can look quite high, as you can loose much of the benefit from feedback loops.

But, the Toolbar curve is very steep, so even loosing 50% of your raw PR has only a small affect on Toolbar values.

[Pegasus]

ciml: I wouldn't have thought that the Toolbar PR Value was the main objective of getting PR

I'd be concerned about losing mass PR, even if it didn't affect my toolbar PR, because it would affect my placing in the SE.

[ciml]

I agree Pegasus, it's the affect on ranking that matters not the Toolbar PR.

The question in my mind is whether the curve for PR weighing is as steep as the curve for the Toolbar. It think it must be pretty steep, else I'm sure the top PR sites would rank high for every word they use.

If so, then loosing half your PR won't make much difference to the rankings or the Toolbar PR.

I'm coming from a different perspective though, if you decide that you need PRn to rank well for keyphraseX, then a 50% loss of raw PR due to a links page shouldn't affect your predictions much.

This is why I think that people worry too much about feedback loops, they make a big difference if you're modelling raw PR but they don't have anything like as much affect in terms of sites getting listed under phrases.

[t2dman]

My experience: Where a competitor advertises the same business as me, my site pr4 theirs 3, they have one outbound link to that business's own site, my competitors site listed higher. Where they have no outbound link, my site higher. Title, keywords, description, firstwords etc virtually the same. Found the same on a site X that I put my link on. Competitors link also on it=2 outbound links. Site X leapt to first page of google listing for main search term. So selective positioning of outbounds improves placement.

[newsparrot]

Thanks for your help,I have pr6+ at present but had no clue I was giving away pr on the outbound link page, it is only used as help to visitors and is not my reciprocal page of good links. So i think I will reduce it by half.