Will an iframe prevent page rank leakage?

[Gremlin098]

I work for a large corporation and have set up a local area web site, which is against company policy. The site has been effective so my company is not demanding that I take it down, but they have asked that I include a number of links from my home page to the official company web site. I'm afraid that I'll bleed page rank if I do this, so I'm wondering if I can put those links in an iFrame on my home page and avoid them being seen as outbound links. Three questions:

1. Would this work?
2. Does it risk a PR penalty by Google?
3. Am I worrying too much about outbound links?

Your thoughts on this are greatly appreciated!

[tedster]

An iframe for the link would mean there's only one url where the link occurs instead of on lots of pages. This minimizes PR effects. But you can use a rel="nofollow" attribute in the anchor tag and that stops the link from passing any PageRank.

Your third option is what I agree with most. So-called "PR leakage" through outbound links is not really an issue worthy of concern.

[edited by: tedster at 11:22 pm (utc) on Aug. 18, 2008]

[Gremlin098]

Thanks Tedster. I had a feeling I was over-thinking it. I'll just stick them in there with a no-follow.

[driller41]

Does linking out cause a site to 'bleed' pagerank in the first place?

[leela]

I would say it does, because the part of the pagerank that flows to your outgoing links cannot flow to pages on your site. But on a site with a normal linking structure, the effect should not be big.

[Gremlin098]

My understanding is that an outbound link "donates" roughly 1/50th of your page rank to the site you are linking to. Not sure how that's calculated.

[leela]

According to the original definition in [dbpubs.stanford.edu:8090...] the formula for calculating pagerank is:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

which means, roughly that the amount of pagerank that is given to every link is the pagerank of the current page divided by the number of links on the current page.

so it depends on the amount of links that you have on your page and the ratio of outgoing to internal links whether and how much it will hurt you.

[driller41]

That is interesting - of course it assumes an equal weighting between internal and external links within the formula which may not be the case.

[leela]

@driller41: good point. of course there could be all kinds of weightings or penalties that influence how much pagerank is passed to which links. But if it's only a couple of links, I still would not worry too much about it.