Does a external link from site A to B steal PR from A?

Could it, in any way, be bad for me to link to other external webpages?

[referer]

See subject.

[diamondgrl]

It's not really that it steals PR. It is that PR is accumulated by receiving links from pages with PR. So if you link to someone else's site, you are losing an opportunity to give your own site more PR.

You can use a "nofollow" attribute to you a href tag to prevent leakage, if that's your concern.

[Wizard]

Exactly like diamondgrl says - the page you put outbound link doesn't loose PR itself, but internal links from this page to your other pages pass accordingly pass less PR, so ultimately you loose a bit of PR.

But if the outbound is related to the subject of your page, for example, the page is about widgets and you link out to an authority site about widgets, you gain much more in SERPs than you loose due to PR leakage.

Using nofollow in such case may be considered gaming Google and if used persistently, might lead to penalty. There are more ways to hide outbound links, but they are not advisable.

The exception is if you link to bad neighbourhood or sites with bad reputation - hide these links with javascript.

But why would you like to link to bad sites anyway?

[jsavvy293]

ummm, using nofollow is not gaming Google. Websites use it all the time.

and as for linking out to external sites, I think it is a good thing to do. If you didn't link to other pages, how "natural" would your website be? If you link to say 100 websites/page, now that might not be the smartest thing.

[Wizard]

using nofollow is not gaming Google. Websites use it all the time

Depends how you use it. If you put nofollow on some outbound links, especially in user-added content, that's ok. But if a website puts nofollow on every outbound link - that obviously looks like they wanted to manipulate PR distribution, and might lead to a penalty.

[edd1]

I have always found outbound quality links in an appropriate context very, very helpful

[Kufu]

The whold point of the web is to be link documents to each other in order to provide a useful utility for the visitors. If you have to resort to 'nofollow' tags then you may be linking out too much. So if you have a few links leaving your site then it should be fine; however, you may not want to have a lot of those links on your home page, not for PR, but for increasing stickiness.

[Smashing Young Man]

I only use nofollow on my own internal links that might be seen as duplicate content by search engines. Aside from that, to hell with PR - to be blunt.

[Gimp]

Wizard,

On your nofollow penalty is that just your opinion or can you document actual cases of penalties?

[rise2it]

Forget 'pagerank'.

You're chasing ghosts. It mattered up until about the end of 2003.

Since then, it's only useful for making people 'chase their own tail'.

[texasville]

>>>Forget 'pagerank'<<<
Easy to say but obtaining inbound links is much easier when you have at least moderate pr.
Plus I have seen "authoritative" people say that you should have at least two outbound links on each page of your site. That in itself is said to build "trust" in a site in g's eyes. Don't know myself, but I do it.
I give my visitor links or guides to other sites informative to the topic on that page.

[annej]

Earlier Matt Cutts said a nofollow is simply a non vote for the page you are linking to in terms of PR. Hopefully someone here has the exact quote.

I don't see any penalty here, at least bit directly. There are so many other factors in the Google algo though, and I suspect it might help to link to quality sites/pages on your topic.