Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I could count on 1 hand how many external links i have allowed on my site.
Is this detrimental to be so top heavy with inbound links? or should i start adding some external links?
cheers
mikey
by linking to other sites you are donating your PR to them. on small sites such as mine this is especially detrimental. like in real life, only the rich don't hurt from donating.
by linking to other sites you are donating your PR to them. on small sites such as mine this is especially detrimental. like in real life, only the rich don't hurt from donating.
Well, I have a directory, article site with over 80 thousand outbound links. Clean, no funny business, static without using no-follow or any such PR protection things.
It is PR 7 and rock solid, many of the internal pages are PR 6 and 5, so no, in my experience anyway, excessive outbounds do not hurt you.
On the other hand, I have one site with over 13 thousand INBOUND links, and very few outbounds. It is PR6 with tons of traffic. So if this is any indication, neither outbound nor inbound excessive links hurt you...
UNLESS (drum roll) you get them all at once. Big changes fast in linking structure is like putting a gun to your site's head. They need to accumulate over time.
the google mystics are wrong on outbound links not hurting. after deleting links to quality neighborhoods my ranking improved.
Anecdotal evidence is more anecodote than evidence, but if you want to go that route, I can do it, too. :-)
My site has thousands of outbound links--some on the main and secondary index.html pages--and it does extremely well in Google for any number of competitive phrases (i.e., phrases with millions, tens of millions, or--in a cases--hundreds of millions of competitors).
When you think about it, that makes perfect sense: Google's unique selling proposition, PageRank, is built around the Web's most fundamental principles: hypertext linking. So, even if there is some minuscule amount of "PR leak" from an outbound link, one of those 99+ other search factors is likely to offset it, simply because the existence of a true World Wide Web (as opposed to a collection of private fiefdoms) is in Google's own interest.
deleting links to quality neighborhoods my ranking improved
Don't you mean "bad" neighborhoods? Quality ones by all rights should be helping you, not hurting you. Perhaps you miss-spoke? Confused..
If no one knows about your site and you only got 2 IBLs, linking out to 100 sites per page is going to leak PageRank, and that will make it more difficult to stay out of the supplemental index.
If you're a TBPR 7 site, you are not going to hurt by linking out. Think of Paris Hilton losing $100,000 playing poker in Vegas. That isn't going to hurt her, not even a tiny bit.
As for ranking, as mentioned, there are 100's of factors involved, not to mention constant flux in the ranking of your competitors, so I don't see any way you can attribute rise in ranking to just one factor.
It's also worth remembering that linking out increases the chance of other websites linking back to you naturally.
So unless you got serious supplemental problems and no way of gaining IBLs (its spam or MFA) I really don't see a reason why you should remove links to other quality sites.
Build for both Google and people but I'd recommend always choosing people over Google.
[edited by: Halfdeck at 10:30 pm (utc) on Feb. 11, 2007]
