Link Popularity 'Drain'

Google states link popularity (Pagerank?) can be drained from a page.

[internetheaven]

Just read this on Google:

"...these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO's other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content."

Does this mean that you PageRank can drop if you give away too many links?

[ciml]

This a fundamental aspect of PageRank; it is shared between the links.

For a site that only links internally, a single external link will remove some PR at each iteration. This reduces PR feedback and can drain a proportion of raw PR.

However, most sires have at least one external link already so the PR feedback is quite irrelevant.

More importantly, PageRank is shown on the Toolbar (and more importantly is applied) according to a steep log scale. Loosing 20% of your raw PageRank has a negligible impact on Toolbar PR and rankings so I wouldn't give this issue any consideration on a real Web site.

I know quite a few SEOs, and I find the idea that links from SEOs are likely to be to "sites with unsavory or illegal content" as pretty strange. On the other hand, linking to over-SEOd penalised sites is always a possibility and I would be pretty wary about joining an SEO link scheme.