How Many Is "Too Many Outgoing Links"?

[115francis]

I work for a site that is really trying to make a go of it. We offer free facts for lots of people and get a good amount of page views. We sell banners, pops, and text ads. This combination is allowing us to stay afloat, but I have heard recently that having too many text ads (with outgoing links) on your site can lower your page rank. Does anyone know how many outgoing links is too many? I hate to think that the very thing that is making us able to offer such good free stuff to the world might actually cause us to lose page rank. Isn't that sort of like google penalizing us for having ads on our site?

Thanks for any help.

francis

[msr986]

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

According to Google: [google.com...]

[MHes]

Hi

You won't loose page rank for a page if you have one link out or 400. You just dilute the amount of page rank you are giving each link (including internal links).

Google say they will only count 100 links on a page, but this does not mean they won't follow them if you have more than 100 or that it will do you any harm. Google have been known to say one thing but do another :) However, a page full of links with little normal text may make you look like a links page which may, like many links pages recently, have a dampening effect on your rankings.

Personally I would not worry, just make the pages original with useful content, that is what Google wants and are working on finding.

Welcome to the forum.

[percentages]

Yeah....what MHes says sounds good to me :)

[115francis]

Thank you very much for your help! I'll try to keep the ads under control (more text ads=fewer pops as well!).

[netcommr]

you could always use javascript to write out the urls for the ads in your code

[JonR28]

one solution we have for ads is that our main page is set up to take a parameter like this:

mydomain.com/index.cfm?bannerid=94

Then the ads would link to our domain with the banner ID, count the outgoing click (because we charge per click), and metarefresh to the person's page. This way our main page has no outgoing links unless Google fallows all the way through the metarefresh... which it might, but we just use that to count clicks anyway.