Big G, PR, outgoing links and link directory

[royalelephant]

I have a web directory of sites organized by topic which is part of my site, but if these outgoing links are diminishing my site's PR value, is there a way to present pages and pages of organized links so that Google will say... "hmm, helpful directory of online resources."

[ciml]

I can't imagine any way to get Google to credit your outgoing links without also sucking some PageRank, but PR leakage is a highly overrated topic in my opinion.

I think we're a long way from being able to expect Google or any engine to be able to differentiate between a helpful directory of online resources and a bunch of links.

[pleeker]

PR leakage is a highly overrated topic in my opinion.

That's how I've felt, too, and reading this older thread [webmasterworld.com] only made my opinion stronger today.

[royalelephant]

perhaps leakage is a small worry when compared to the big picture...

I think we're a long way from being able to expect Google or any engine to be able to differentiate between a helpful directory of online resources and a bunch of links.

True, though is it difficult to match the page's title and H1's, etc., with the link's targets? If the outgoing link is an affiliate, score it -3. If it's a content rich page on a content-orientated site, score it +5, etc...
but then won't there just be more loopholes to play with....

[nileshkurhade]

But the directory dose tend to diminish the keyword density of your site. So may be (just a thought) having a subdomain like directory.mydomain.com could make google think

"hmm, helpful directory of online resources."

[netnerd]

More likely "Hmmm - triangular reciprocal link scheme...."

[usavetele]

What is everyone's thoughts about reciprocal linking? I'm coming across sites that want to trade links, but not straight across, i.e., if a site owner has more than one site, they want to put my link on their site, then want me to put a link on my site that is one of their other sites. Does Google prefer this form of linking? Is this style of linking better? PR better from it? SERPs better than with traditional linking?

[steveb]

Google has no problem with reciprocal links.

Google specifically says "Don't participate in link schemes..." just to boost PR or ranking and avoid links to bad neighborhoods.

These new rocket scientist link schemes don't do something that is natural and instead offer a scheme Google specifically doesn't like. Duh.

[slade7]

My links page always has the same pr as my home page.

The page title includes the word links, and the url is mysite/links.php - have the word links on the page several times... Have about 40 or 50 links on it, many of the sites link back... some have pr, some don't.

I think that a lot of people's difficulty with google pr can be helped by a strong internal link structure and a large number of legit pages with legit content...

I can usually help fix many pr0 pages I have by linking to them myself, and making sure that dynamic pages have a default state and that I link to that default state from somewhere.

[lazurus]

I have a web directory of sites organized by topic which is part of my site, but if these outgoing links are diminishing my site's PR value, is there a way to present pages and pages of organized links so that Google will say... "hmm, helpful directory of online resources."

If these links are helpful for your visitors (on topic) Google will also see them as "helpful". If the links are for the sake of getting incoming links, to in turn get PR, then Google will not see them as helpful.

My opinion is leave the directory type links to directories and focus on the topic of your site.