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G) Outbound Links:
From every page, link to one or two high ranking sites under that particular keyword. Use your keyword in the link text (this is ultra important for the future).
what do you mean by this? if page x of my site is about cars should i for exmaple link to a car-category in odp, or if my page y is about dogs should i place on that page a link to a site with the highest results for "dog" in google?
or do you mean internal linking within my site?
On my travel site, I link an inner page of a certain region to the authority in that region, which could even be a "paper written by someone in an .edu site".
Not traveled related? Doesn´t matter to me. It´s INFORMATIVE to the person surfing my site...therefore, useful in his decision-making process.
I only make sure the page I link to has the highest PR.
Google's whole premise is that your ranking is based on what others think of you. By giving a bonus for simply linking to a popular site Google is in effect allowing you to vote for yourself.
Additionally it creates less relevant search results. The goal of a search engine is to furnish the user with the URLs that answer their question. If you bring outbound links into the algorithm what you're doing is saying "Instead of telling you where to find your answer, we're giving you a link to a site that has links to sites that probably have the answer you are looking for." It's bad for the end user.
Now how Teoma did this is okay, they have a seperate result set that uses outbound links as a criteria and they place it off to the side with a different heading. Doing it any other way, such as by making it a criteria in your main search results, is quite literally a step backword for the end user experience.
Nope. The "links are a vote but some votes count more than others" simplifacation is appealing but the wrong way to look at it. Putting aside the fact that people are quoting "facts" based on *old* papers and that the concept of neighbourhoods has yet to fully register the one thing that remains is that G! is based on the Random Surfer model.
Outbound links - more important than they have ever been IMHO, it just takes a little more effort to view things in 3D when we have been used to 2D for so long.
Plus what can it hurt... the ODP and Yahoo have tonnes of outbounds and they still manage to do ok in the PR stakes (e.g PR 10).
"...Outbound links - more important than they have ever been ..."
I couldn´t agree more. It just makes sense googlewise.
bnc929,
with all due respect, I am not sure what your understanding of Google purpose is or SEs in general...
"...Instead of telling you where to find your answer, we're giving you a link to a site that has links to sites that probably have the answer you are looking for..."
When Google presents as a search result, a hub/authority who might have the answer via outbound links to already relevant sites, it is indeed telling the surfer that this result very likely answers his inquiry. This is a GREAT search output in my opinion, and one that shortens a surfers´quest.
Besides, a website owner who really wants to help surfers satisfy their informational needs WILL offer many additional links to relevant information. The alternative would be to have the linked page info copied on your own website..but why not give credit to the source by linking to it. In fact, I couldn´t care less about Google´s algo. If it is good for my visitors, G can PR0 me for the rest of eternity... Keeping visitors happy will make them come back.
Not getting page one results? My kingdom for one happy customer´s word of mouth.
That's what PAGErank is, but I don't think anybody here is claiming that outbound links improve your pagerank (cuz they clearly don't). This discussion is speculative, and virtually unprovable for that matter, but your arguments why Google would NOT factor in outbound are obviously just as speculative.
Personally, I have seen results from my own site that suggest to me that the TEXT within an outbound link can be factored highly. But I am an agnostic on the issue of whether the actual page you are linking to makes any difference in your SERP rankings.
