Will Removing Links to Other Sites Affect PR?

[vancyborg]

I am running a well optimized website, the homepage has the 5th PageRank. It is online since 3 years and I have linked a few top ranking of my industry related websites on homepage. If I suppose removing those links from home page, will it affect my PR?

My Google back links: 19 and Yahoo back links: 271

Please advise...

[nomis5]

Totally without any hard evidence but from many years of experience. Outbound links from your home page are of little value as far as Google is concerned, but obviously may be of value to your visitors. But outbound links from other pages on your site, if "on subject" and applied with restraint will help you rankings Google-wise. Don't remove them. The idea of bleeding PR to other sites with relevant, sensible outbound links, is not true as far as I can judge.

[tedster]

According to the original PageRank Formula, external links in your home Page will mean that the links to your internal pages each get a smaller share of PageRank circulated to them. That would mean they have slightly less PR to flow back to the Home Page, so there would be a small drop in PageRank due to the external links.

This drop would not necessarily show up on the simplified toolbar display with only goes 0 to 10. And so, again according to this original math, removing those external links "should" circulate more PR within your own site.

However, that is the original forumla, and Google has definitely changed the original formula - one recent change was just in January of this year.

Google has not told us the exact details of the change, but a lot of people are speculating that there is now a factor that looks at the domain as a whole, and not just page-by-page. The original patent did not talk about domains at all.

In practice, I've never been able to pin down a poor effect on PR from using external links, or a good effect from removing them. And I can only assume that all the talk in past years about "bleeding PageRank through external links" was not a happy thing for Google, either. I'm sure that they would not want their algorithms to cause people to make the web a less useful resource because people are trying to hoard PageRank.

[Kristos]

I agree with what Tedster has said.
No real evidence exists (that I have pinned down)
that outbound links will bleed PR (at least with what G shows us) but I HAVE, repeat HAVE seen that it can affect rankings in the G serps!

[vancyborg]

Does It mean better to remove the outbound links or do I want keep it?

[tedster]

There's a lot of good input for you here, but the decision must be yours. Make your own choice.

[vancyborg]

Thanks Tedster. :-)

[Atharva]

vancyborg,
So what have you decided and let us know the results too !

[edd1]

I've seen evidence that outbound links affect the SEPPs in a positive way if done properly.

But not page rank.

[webdude]

I believe I have seen evidence, though small, in OBLs actually helping, if not in PR, then in the actual SERPs. I find this true, especially when related to trust and authority sites. An authority, I believe, would have many trusted outbounds. Why would that be a detriment to a site?

I did an experiment on one of my throw away sites several months ago. I either deleted all outbounds or used robots.txt or the nofollow tag. I left it that way for a month and a half to see how it would affect the SERPs and PR. I saw no change in toolbar PR. The site actually lost a couple of positions in the SERPs for about 20% of the search words/phrases.

Now granted, there were not any big changes and I cannot attribute the drop to the killing of the outbounds specifically, but there were no other changes made to the site during this period. The site had several thousand outbounds from a directory and some highly trusted outbounds from the homepage and several other pages. There were also many outbounds in a forum... I really don't know how many.

Just another one of those grand experiments ;-)

[vancyborg]

Atharva,
I plan to keep those links on homepage.

[Hissingsid]

Hi,

In my experience outlinks on you own page definitely help boost you a few places for the term in the anchor text in the following circumstances.

1. Your site already ranks in the top 20 for that term.

2. The site that you are pointing to is in the top 5 for that term and for other closely related terms. Whenever I've put a link to a top site it has always had the term in its title and has been semantically rich around the term elsewhere on the page

It may also work in other circumstances but this has always worked for me. I personally think that it has something to do with semantic webs.

Cheers

Sid

[Atharva]

Hissingsid,
Interesting input !