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surely by making it so that incoming links were valuable, but outgoing links were just null - it would encourage webmasters to point visitors further round the web...
any guesses as to their thinking?
Harley
As has been pointed out at some length, it is their search engine they can do what they want with it, list who they want and penalize who they want.
It is not clear if this defensive posture is actually beneficial to Googles reputation in the long run.
do they realise the only reason they are PR ten is cos people link to them?
Harley
but its silly - i can see no reason why they would let PR leak - linking is a good thing, as long as its to a decent site - google has a responsibilty as number one top dog search engine - they shape the Net - google is killing linking, and people are now just hiding their links pages, and using JS links ect as a plot - but still google screws its thumb down even harder...
do they realise the only reason they are PR ten is cos people link to them?Harley
they obviously know something which we dont? The Algorithm!
I understand what you are saying, but I think they are far from silly and know exactly where to take their search engine.
Shak
So if I have a PR 5 site and 5 outbound links, the receiving sites will get a bigger boost than if I had the same PR 5 site with 100 outbound links.
Can anyone shed some light on this line of thinking?
IMO, this is a foolish obsession for many people. If you don't have an outbound links page at all, then there IS no page to pass along any PR, either to your other pages or to the outbound target pages.
There's no way I'm going to undermine any site that I feel is worthy of a link. I'd rather create more content than give this area any of my energy.
A decrease of PR directly follows from the original algorithm. Thus, it's not Google's idea, it's part of the system.
If you have a better idea which lead to better search results publish it. However, at least your algorithm must lead to a unique solution. So far I don't see this for the case you described. Even if, I think this would lead to worse results because you could be easily spam (compared to the current algorithm) by crosslinking sites.
Also, I don't have any problem with linking to other sites although I know that it deceases PR. Moreover, it can improve your ranking.
remember the thing about google loving finding "bob's fishing link's page"? to all other sites about fishing? that page is useful to google, surely it won't penalise it's friends and upgrade those sites who don't help google out? :S
Thanks for confirmation on that tedster. I know that I added over 100 outbound links last month and my PR still increased a point this update.
My site has thousands of outbound links, and it ranks #1 for many, many important keywords and keyphrases. Not only that, but it keeps moving up in the SERPs and has been leapfrogging competitors in the Google Directory, which suggests that its PageRank has climbed from a low PR6 to a high PR6.
I've never hesitated to give outbound links where appropriate, and I've rarely solicited links from other sites. Instead, I've concentrated on building a site that meets my readers' needs.
I really do believe that quality is rewarded. One day I discovered that I had an inbound link from a a PR8 page at an important reference site, and a few weeks ago I got two PR6 links from a Forbes "Best of the Web" review. I've even had links from a major luggage manufacturer and an airline. Why? Because I focus on serving my readers instead of trying to obtain and hoard PageRank. Maybe that isn't a practical approach for e-commerce sites, but it appears to be a very useful editorial strategy for content sites.
My solution? Don't let google follow them. How?
Robots.txt ban on /external
All links rewritten as /external/goto.php?url=whatever.com
Google's not a genius, it think's those are internal links, and because it can't follow them, it never gets wise.
To really hide that link, you need to make it so that google does not consider it to be a link at all by using javascript.
But PR is only one part of the equation. If you horde your links, you might find that you will regret it.
Particularly if other webmasters realize what you are up to, and therefore don't want to link to you.
very clever vincevincevince!
Is it?
The folks at Google are smart--I doubt if they bought their Ph.D. degrees from e-mail spammers--and it's in their interest to protect the "natural linking patterns" on which PageRank is based. Who knows? Maybe they award brownie points to pages that have external links. And even if they don't, they must be aware that widespread "PR hoarding" would threaten the integrity and usefulness of their PageRank concept.
Anyone who thinks outbound links are bad for PageRank should look at the examples of DMOZ and Yahoo, both of which have higher PR on their home pages than most of us ever will.
