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Is outbound linking, certainly to good sites - a bad thing in any way? does the total PR for your site drop if you have 20 outbound links to PR3 + sites? - i would have thought it would in fact be a good thing - as promoting linking is a good thing - both for visitors and for googlebot...
so should i be linking - are links pages a good thing - and should i stop trying to protect my PR?
Harley
If it is a good link and helpful, then link to it.
[edited by: mrguy at 4:22 pm (utc) on June 9, 2003]
Don't forget that Yahoo and DMOZ have untold thousands (millions?) of outbound links, and the PR of their homepages is among the highest on the planet.
I thought it was well known that outbound links leak PR by a factor of the number of links, and also that it makes no difference what PR the site linked to has... the only PR that matters is the PR of the page that links to yours.
Linking out will lose PR.
Not linking out at all will get you penalised.
Linking out to major sites may/may not have benefit. My guess is that it has no benefit.
My answer: Have a buried links page, with all your outbound links on it, so your PR bounces around your own site before leaking out. Avoid linking to your links page from too many places.
Providing them with carefully selected outbound links is a method of making your site more valuable to them.
I thought it was well known that outbound links leak PR by a factor of the number of links,
See:
[webmasterworld.com...]
(I especially like Marcia's comment that "You don't lose PR for a page by linking, you just decide how you want to distribute what you'll be giving others.")
You'll find other threads on this topic by using the WW site search function to search on "PR leakage," "leaking PR," etc.
Thinking in terms of web maps, Google is trying to present well connected areas of the web. It wouldn't look "organic" if there were a lot of sites that didn't link out - that's how the web works.
So my guess is that having a few outbound links to authorities would be helpful.
There are always posts about - does linking to google and yahoo help my rankings? I think if there is an impact, it must be due to linking to hubs and authorities.
Instead of thinking in terms of PageRank, I try to think in terms of web maps and 'organicness' because I think that is where Google is headed.
The page linking does not lose PR. PR leak describes the fact that the amount of PR your page can pass on diminishes with the number of links.
PR leaks, but a lot of people have anecdotal evidence that outbound linking can have advantages in other areas of the algo.
I agree, BigDave. Looking over my search strings, I have gotten many, many hits from people looking for resources that I linked to.
I'm in an area where a lot of the "webmasters" are rank amateurs who can't even get their title tag right. So PR leak gets trumped by keyword relevance. :)
Also, one of the most important sites in my category has banned the Googlebot (idiot) so people looking for pages on that site end up on mine. Sometimes they see something they like and stick around for a while . . . or add me to their bookmarks . . . or even link to me.
In fact, the pages I have which are basically a list of targetted (informative) links are among the most popular (and linked to) pages on my site! (Of course I include explanatory text on those pages, which is why they're useful resources, not forgotten "links" pages.)
So linking out has been a very good strategy overall.
I guess my thinking is, if it's good for my user then so be it, Google or not.
My web philosophy is simple, as long as I'm doing everything 'right for my users' I really don't care if the engines like my site or not. Ironically, they seem to love it more, especially Google :)
Which leads me to questions some popular theories going around. Such as 'no heavy interlinking between two sites' which IMO is just another urban myth. But, I guess that's a totally different issue and off-topic for this thread.
Cheers
If you take, and don't give, expect your source to shut you off one day.
My theory is that Google will look for natural link structures on you site. If you deviate too much from that, your PR will be toast. After all, you can link back and forth all day and if you do it in a natural manner, Google dares not penalize you. To do so would be to penalize the entire web.
Just don't start thinking natural link structures are all inbound and no outbound links.
Not linking out at all will get you penalised.
I disagree. There are many authority sites which do not link out :)
Have a buried links page, with all your outbound links on it, so your PR bounces around your own site before leaking out. Avoid linking to your links page from too many places.
If I was linking only from my home page then i would do the exact opposite. Give as much PR to my link page , which in turn will attract more potential link partners. :)
PR leaks, but a lot of people have anecdotal evidence that outbound linking can have advantages in other areas of the algo.
I agree :)
Will outbound linking have any effect of theming now?
Outbound links can always be used as a part of your theming strategy :)
Which leads me to questions some popular theories going around. Such as 'no heavy interlinking between two sites' which IMO is just another urban myth.
This issue is a much more complex one and IMHO depends upon the PR of a site. I believe if one of the sites involved in heavy crosslinking has a good reputation (like a good web map or High PR) then no penalties are incurred. If the sites are new then i am not so sure. I thought The second eigenvalue of google matrix [webmasterworld.com] was a nice paper which dealt with this but some of the better versed Mathematics fellows of our forum think otherwise :)
If you take, and don't give, expect your source to shut you off one day.
My thoughts exactly :)
Just don't start thinking natural link structures are all inbound and no outbound links.
Why do you say that? Are you discounting authorities? :)
Links out of your site lose you overall PR with Google.
Links out of your site lose you overall PR with Google.
If that's true, DMOZ and Yahoo must have started with PR1000. :-)
The page linking does not lose PR
There's nothing wrong with that statement.
There's nothing wrong with that statement.
Patrick Taylor is right. In case of a 'normal' link structure the link page as well as the rest of your pages lose PR. (Normal means, that there are not only links to other sites but also links to the rest of your pages.) This statement is still valid even if Google made a number of changes compared to the original algorithm.
As already mentioned, even if PR is decreased, outgoing links could improve the ranking.
First off, PR is calculated by page, not site.
PR leakage refers to your ability to pass PR on (presumably to the other pages of your site). The more links you have on one page, the less PR each link can pass on. The links to NOT take away from the PR of that page.
Page rank is based on links that come in to that page, not the links that go out. The number of links on the page will affect what proportion of the available pr gets passed on to each of the pages being linked to, but the pr of the page itself does not change whether there's a few links or many.
I hope this helps.
Pagerank represents the mathmatical equation to assign an individual page a quantity.
This (according to the original equation) is deduced by the number of inbound links coming into a page. The number of outbound links has nothing at all to do with this particular page's pagerank.
This number is established independent of the number of outbound links. It isn't a fluid value (as of the original equation)
However
You can optimize the amount of PR that you distribute back into your site.
I just think that terms 'leak' or 'bleed' cause some confusion in that people perceive this notions to come from a fluid calculation in which PR is entering and leaving the site in one calculation.
<edit>Did not intend to completely reiterate mfisshy's post...too slow</edit>
[edited by: Quinn at 9:47 pm (utc) on June 10, 2003]
Outbound links do affect a page's PR though
The calculator is probably deducing PR. I believe mfishy and I are being quite literal in reference to the equation. Maybe that's where the confusion is coming from....
