rel="nofollow" 3rd party site PR drain prevention?

[Slinger]

I have read many posts about rel="nofollow" on here but I still need to clarify something before I jump in the deep end of the pool...

I have a site and we are going to add about 25-30 3rd party calculators for our clients on MANY different pages of our site. My boss wants them added to most pages of our site. The customer will click a link, it will pop-off a browser window and launch a calculator that is on someone elses site for our customers to use.

Im planning on adding the rel="nofollow" code to all those links.

Will that prevent me from losing my Page Rank off our pages?

[tedster]

The rel="nofollow" attribute stops a link from voting any power at all to the target site. Google removes it from the web graph that they use in calcualting all manner of link juice - PR, trust, anchor text. with a rel="nofollow" attribute, no link related power of any kind is sent to the target page of the link.

However, this idea of "PR drain" can make you do crazy things, because it's been both misunderstood and exaggerated beyond sanity. According to the original PR formula, when a page "votes" for another by linking to it, that does not diminish the PR of the page itself.

It does, however, split the value of each vote on the page into one more piece. For example, the total available PR may now be split 58 ways instead of 57. So, each internal link is carrying just a smidgen less link juice for the site's internal linking structure to circulate.

However, that old analysis is based on the ORIGINAL and rather simple PageRank formula, which has definitely been changed and refined. In fact, this apparent deterrent to linking out in a natural fashion is one of the holes that I think Google plugged.

I see no evidence today that external linking diminishes the strength of the linking page. Actually, I see the opposite effect - at the very least the anchor text can be a positive on-page factor.