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1. I have a friend with an information site that has grown to a PR8 with over 3000 inbound links. He is now being approached by people who want to advertise on his site in what seemingly is only for PageRank reasons (otherwise they are promoting products that completely off topic).
I told him to be careful because he will dilute his PR and the people who are calling him (online gambling and such). Does anyone have any experience with how many outbound links are too many? Is it easy to dilute himself to a PR7.
2. Typically I go with the notion that secondary pages of a site will have a PR one less than the home page. However, I have a new client who loses about 3 ranks (7 to 4)from home to secondary pages. However, he has about 700 links to secondary pages on stemming from his home. If he categorized these into let's say 40 links, would that help from a PR standpoint? (I know that it would from a navigation standpoitn for a human.)
3. We just did "on page" optimization work for a client and their home page dropped from a PR6 to a PR5 during our work. We put no outbound links anywhere on the site, but did add 4 links to the home page to secondary pages. I know there are many reasons PR could have dropped, but I've never seen adding 4 internal links causing this? Have I just been lucky?
Thnaks as always...
So everything relaming the same, your friends PR8 should stay the same, although the other pages that are linked to on the homepage wil receive a slight drop in PR (depending on the volume of current links on that page). If there are already 50 links on the homepage, then adding another 1 (even if it's an offsite link), will prolly not make a difference in the slightest. If there are only 2 other links on thr page, then he is increasing the number of links of that page by 50% if he were to put another link on there .. so the 2 pre-existing links would receive a noticable hit in terms of PR.
For these very reasons, I doubt that you having added 4 links to your clients page would have affected the PR!
As for the other issue .. 700 links on one page? thats a joke
2. Typically I go with the notion that secondary pages of a site will have a PR one less than the home page. However, I have a new client who loses about 3 ranks (7 to 4)from home to secondary pages. However, he has about 700 links to secondary pages on stemming from his home. If he categorized these into let's say 40 links, would that help from a PR standpoint? (I know that it would from a navigation standpoitn for a human.)
How large is the page in kilobytes? If it's over 101k chances are that not all of the links will pass pagerank, the googlebot will only fetch the first 101k of a document.
At this point, he seems bent on having these 750 links from his home page becuase he thinks that it makes his site look authoritative. I must say that graphically, the site looks like it was done by a 12 year old, so I may actually assume that he is right in think that he has gotten a lot of links becuase of how much information it looks like he has on this one single page.
I have many secondary pages that are listed in the Directory and are well over 101k. Google indexes and caches the entire page.
Interesting also that secondary pages with a directory listing usually have pr equal to, and sometimes higher than, my index page.
I wouldn't advertise gambling stuff on a serious website that has nothing to do with it, he could easily find better fitting sponsors, making his sponsors happy because they get customers that actually buy, the visitors from his site have more sites to the same topic and he could easily gain more money if he also gets a few % of sales.
<If the pagerank algo has remained somewhat the same over the years (which it hasn't), then the amount of links on any given page will not directly reflect the PR given to that apge, given that the PR is derived from inbound links only, and not outbound links ..>
The outbound links will cause a small decrease, because...
The home page links to the sub-pages increasing their PR, which links back to the home page increasing its PR. If the home page links to offsite pages that don't link back, then the home page gives a smaller portion of its PR to the sub-pages, which in turn have less PR to give to the home page.
I'm confused. My site has over 2500 outbound links and 890 inbound. Home page is 6/10, 60% of subs are 5/10, most of remaining are also 6/10. All subs link back home. Just 1 outbound on home. (get rid of it? it's HonCode) My confusion is that most of what is being discussed is not applying. Or, I'm completely missing something here.
By the way, I am REALLY glad I found this place...
<My confusion is that most of what is being discussed is not applying. Or, I'm completely missing something here.>
The amount of PR that a link gives to another page is dependent on the PR of the page where the link resides. Approximately 85% (this percentage has probably changed over time) of the total PR on a page is taken, then divided by the number of links on the page, and each link assigns that PR to the page.
Let's say I have a PR with 50 (not toolbar PR or directory PR, but the actual PR that Google doesn't let us see). The page has 10 links on it. 85% of 50 is 42.5. Divide that by 10, and each link gives out 4.25 PR.
Let's now say that these 10 lines are a page dedicated to outbound links (a "links page"). Five of them are internal to my site (navigation), and five of them are outbound to other sites. I'm giving 21.25 PR to various pages on my site (5 * 4.25), and 4.25 to each of the other five, *instead* of giving the total 42.5 to my site.
The algorithm is run several times over (40 or 50?), so it loops, in that.. my home page gives PR to a sub-page, which gives PR to my home page, which gives PR to a sub-page, which gives PR to my home page, etc. So linking out means you're lowering the potential PR of each page since that portion of that page's PR is given to another page instead of internally.
The PR that the toolbar shows you is a representation from zero to 10 on the actual PR (which Google will never tell us), and this value is rounded to the nearest integer, so it's very possible to be on the low end of a PR6, on the high end, or somewhere in between.. and have no idea.
But to answer your question, you would have a higher PR if you removed the outbound links*, because it'd be focused more on your pages instead of elsewhere. This may not make a visual impact on the toolbar, but it will make an impact on Google's backend.
* - This is in no way meant to indicate that you should remove your outbound links, or that people should not add outbound links to their site.
