Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I've divided these links up into 12 or so different pages by topic and given them subcategories as well. I'd like to weed out and delete a good majority of the poor sites to lessen the number of links, but I have no idea if this is going to cause an uproar since I had no contact with the link holders.
Does this sound like the best plan of attack to cleaning it up? Any other suggestions?
If you answered yes, then it's possible they'll find out you delinked them, and subsequently delink you too.
It's okay to do reciprocal links. In my view, the value lies in having many votes from different websites, and also in the value of having many paths for the search engine bots to find your website. Certainly, a one way link is preferred, but a reciprocal link is perfectly ok.
If you answered no, then you can pretty much safely delete them. HOWEVER, if they are on topic, you can can possibly profit from your data. If you arrange the website information in a directory style, and use the right keywords in there, you can possibly use the directory to attract relevant traffic. You can even delink all the urls and keep the directory. If any of them complain, ask for a reciprocal. ;)
If the directory ranks well for your associated keyword phrase (not your money phrase), you may soon have other webmasters contacting you for reciprocals.
Also, try to keep links on a page to under 100.
It'd be a pain to do, but, again IMO, you'd have pretty algo-proof links pages, the benefits of a directory in the links being under subject/topic, without a directory's obvious framework.
As for uproar, explain to those that complain you're trying to increase the value of your links pages, and I wouldn't worry too much about numbers of outbound links, particularly from inner pages....
The previous webmaster to my site obviously didn't care one bit about outbound links and their implications to page rank
I thought that the less outbound links and the greater inbound links, the better PR...
This idea you have seems to be catching on with more and more people. Maybe I could put you in contact with my competitors and you could convince them of this. I would greatly appreciate it.
Two types or classifications of sites are ranked highly in almost all Google SERPs: Authority sites, and Hub sites. You can be neither if you do not link out to other sites. Google depends on sites that link to other sites to build its index and it rewards authority and hub sites by ranking them highly.
I gladly link to sites without reciprocation in order to provide my users with on topic resources. PageRank is NEVER a consideration.
PageRank is one of many factors governing how your site ranks. PageRank is only one factor in calculating link-popularity, it is not a be all or end all.
Let's take this to an extreme: You don't link to anyone and become a PageRank Hoarder. Mine, mine, mine! Your site just became a dead end. Do you think that will be rewarded? Do you think that will benefit your visitors?
The internet is like love, the more you give, the more you get. Become a recluse, board up your house, and trap visitors so that the only way they can leave is with the back button, and the path that leads to your door will become narrower and narrower with time, and eventually you will be left alone to gloat over your pile of diminishing PageRank gold all by yourself.
My site went from about 3 or 4 outbound links to over 40 strongly related sites overnight. And my PR went up, not down. Although inbound links have possibly changed slighty in that period also.
If you do not link out, how will Google be able to view you as an 'authority' on the subject? If you incoming links are only mildy relevant, does Google use information on the outbound links also? Will they in the future? Will they begin to penalise 'dead end' sites?
And having a huge PR is probably only ever noticed by other webmasters (have you ever seen any other person use the toolbar with pagerank? - i haven't). Try some searches on Google, PR is not the end of the ranking procedure, in fact it seems quite low down on their list of ranking sites: many PR0, 1, 2 and 3 sites are beating PR5,6 and 7 sites.
Maybe Google are acually realising that some smaller sites with good content less inbound links than big sites that have loads are more useful to the public?
thoughts...
Try to think of it as an organic process. As a website grows and develops (forget all the roots and branches and fruit metaphors) its chemistry, its blood sugar, its blood oxegen level, its metabolic rate, whatever, swings about an axis. As links come into your site they bring with it PageRank and you pass PageRank to other sites you value. This, coupled with the proper semantic indicators (keyterms in anchor text) is the life-blood of google. if you stop passing PageRank you become bloated, exhausted, over-rated perhaps (LOL), and ill due to an imbalance in your system. A healthy person learns to eat right, exercise, get plenty of rest, brush her teeth 3 times a day, share, and play well with others.
There is an illusion at play here as well, and that is the illusion of what things would be like if you did them differently. Well, if I had just gone to shool for 5 more years or so I could've been a surgeon and have a porsche, a hummer, and an S600 benz parked outside. Just because I took a different route, does that mean I've lost those things? the spectrum of lost possiblities is endless, but its not real, it's not this life, this site, this now.
Let me try to explain: Say you have a 12 page site and every page links to every other page and each paqe has the same indicated PR. If you add a 13th page and add links to it, you can do one of two things (since we assume the page is like all the others on the site and also links to all other pages on the site), you can keep all your links internal, pointing at only your own pages, or you can add some outbound links. So, you're bleeding off 1/13 of 85% of your homepage PR to this new page, that new page is still giving some back, and to the other pages on the site as well. The loss is not that much. If you have 13 outbound links on that page, then at most you're leaking 1/(26x13)of 85% per outbound link (0.25% per link or a total of 3.25% homepage PR). Yet if each of those sites links out from a PR5 page to you, and you have 13 of them, then you get 42.5% of PR5 to your homepage, a tremendous boost. Most main link pages wouldn't have actual outbound links, but have categories of outbound links. If you set up that way, say, with 13 categories and 13 links per category, (just for discussion purposes to keep the division between internal and outbound links the same and make the calculation easier), then each one of those links would bleed off 1/13th of 85% of 1/26th of 85% of 1/26th of 85% of home page PR. That's less than 0.01% of homepage PR being bled from each outbound link, and would total 1.54% total loss of homepage PR. But now you have 169 links coming back to you. And in the event that they were all PR5 pages (and their site structure was the same), then you'd get 552.5% of PR5 value to your homepage. That may seem like a lop-sided balance, but that's the healthy balance point you want to maintain.
So, yes, technically, it is correct to say that linking to other sites does bleed your PR, but functionally it is incorrect to say that attempts to prevent this from happening is beneficial.
But then take that with the grain of salt that I am the one who originally discovered years ago that the fact that there's 24 hours in a day and 24 beers in a case is no coincident, the calculations are a bit more complex perhaps but the theory behind it is sound...
So I pretty much agree with the chemistry teacher! ;)
>>brush her teeth 3 times a day - does this work for a guy too?
