Links to Google translation pages

[Atharva]

Hi,
It would be great if someone could throw light on this type of outbound linking structure.

On everypage of my site, i have the top most links (in header) and bottom most links (in footer) linking to google translation pages (8 languages)

Thus there are 16 OBL to google translation. Will that affect the flow of PR to my internal pages ?

Should i make them nofollow or any other possible advice where i can not affect my PR at the same time give language users the benefit.

Thanks

[tedster]

It can't hurt to do the experiment - I'd say add rel="nofollow".

According to the original PageRank forumula, that many outbound links certainly could lower the amount of PR circulating in your website. PageRank calculation has been changed since that original formula was published (see this discussion [webmasterworld.com]) so that original formula isn't as solid basis for a decision as it may have been back then.

I certainly wouldn't "vouch for" a dynamic, machine translated page. So nofollow seems quite reasonable to me, even without any PR concerns.

[edited by: tedster at 5:33 pm (utc) on June 29, 2008]

[Atharva]

Thanks Tedster with your ready reply. i am going to try it. any way to track the effect ?

[Atharva]

I have indeed done the following.

Buw what is the best way to measure the impact ?

[tedster]

Short term, look for changes in search traffic, especially to your internal pages. Long term, you "might" see a change in the toolbar PR for some of your deeper pages. But the toolbar can be a flake, so don't hold your breath on that part.

[Staffa]

A word of caution for "machine translated page"

Out of curiosity I recently tried one of these Google links on a site to see what the result was and .... oh boy

The site's English text stated that they were familiar with the Asian market and the French translation read that they were NOT familiar....