Outbound links per page/site - can too many hurt?

[silencers01]

Does anyone know anything about this as far as testing or experimentation?

Working on a huge site (pages in the millions), that has had several other problems over the past year, but this one definitive change onsite is that most pages, where there used to be 25 outbound links, now may have close to double. This can flux here and there on a page to page basis, but overall it seems to be that the 25 outbounds have gone to 40-45 on avg. with not much else on the page changing. This goes for 1/2-3/4 of the site's pages.

Anyone have any insight into if this would bring these pages down individually in the ranks, or negetaively effect the site as a whole?

thanks for any help

[tedster]

That is a lot of outbound links per page - unless you're running a directory. Yes, from sites that work with, I can say there might be some added PR "leakage" from increasing your outbound links to that level.

However, there are many other factors than just PR in search rankings. So if you feel these outbounds are valuable for your visitors, I'd still say go ahead, but monitor the effect.

[silencers01]

if they were to have negative effects do you think it would be on a page by page basis or across the board? I'm assuming it could go either way.

[tedster]

Probably page by page, only getting hurt on some of the most competitive search terms. But with so many factors in the Google algo, I'd say just monitor the resultsand don't borrow trouble before it shows up.

Another factor to consider,if trouble does show up, is diluting the semantic focus of a page by adding so many new anchor tags and their text. Sometimes that can also be a problem.

[netfleet]

How about adding "nofollow" tags to the links which in theory should preserve PR within the page.

[silencers01]

tedster thanks for the info. gonna do a test of 25-50 pages and throw em back to the way they used to be and track em for a bit. never even thought about the semantic issues even though most of the anchors are single word. thanks so much for the insight