External Links

Best way to link to external sites

[Ben2003uk]

Hello, just about to create a new website which will contain a number of external links - basicly it will be a directory of related websites.

I have read around the forum and noticed that external links can affect your PR. If I have 100s of external links will my PR be effected? If so what is the best way to combat it?

Thankyou

Ben

[SEOtop10]

Hi Ben

A part of the PR for this page will get passed on to the target page.

Google will not see your links as links if you use Javascript in the links. This way you can retain the PR.

However in my opinion, if you have well structured pages with outgoing links on related topics and proper anchor text (keyword rich), your pages will benefit a lot. Don't bother about hiding the links from Google.

Arun

[manilla]

I's not sure if the jury is still out on whether "external link lose PR" or not. My personal belief is that they don't, but if anyone has positive evidence to the contrary I'd like to hear about it.

Here is a recent thread I found useful.

[webmasterworld.com...]

[WebGuerrilla]

The amount of PR a given page can pass to another page is directly related to the total number of links on the page. If all of the links on your page are to other pages on your site, then you are keeping your PR "in house." If you link to other sites, then a percentage of that page's PR is passed to the external site.

However, the number of links on a given page does not impact the PR of that page.

[europeforvisitors]

A part of the PR for this page will get passed on to the target page.

Technically, PR isn't "passed along." (That would imply that it's being subtracted from the PR of the page that's doing the linking.)

In other words, PageRank isn't like having a bowl of M&Ms and giving away a portion of those M&Ms every time you link to another page. It's like having a bowl of M&Ms and being handed another bowl of M&Ms to divvy up among the pages that you're linking to. (And no, you don't get to keep those extra M&Ms if you don't use them for the intended purpose!)