Do tons of outbound links on messageboard posts cause substantial page rank bleeding?

I run a 6 month old message board, with a lowly PR of 1. There are a few forums on the message board where there are thousands of articles and recipes with outbound links to the information source. These outbound links do not have an inbound link coming back. The pages these links eminate from are not important pages, and are the lowest on the totem pole so to speak (think of a topic posted within a forum on a messageboard).

I believe that each new topic started in theory adds a tid bit of page rank to my site's homepage (once it's indexed since each topic has a link to the homepage)......so am I losing a little bit of that potential page rank with all these outbound links to other sites?

When hyperlinking, should I change my vB code to say nofollow instead of URL? My website doesn't even give me the option to use a nofollow code on links, so I wouldn't even know where to begin.

Any help would be appreciated!

 

you dont lose page rank because of outbound links

 

If the links are not themed to the content on the page, it may cost you serps (which you should be concerned about)... but as lorien said it won't affect pagerank (which doesn't matter much anyways).

 

Sorry for the ignorance, I'm kind of a newb at this.....

The content on my page with the outbound link is always relevant to my site, which is an obesity help site. I get a lot of obesity and health articles from various news sources or health databases and link to them. Some of the news websites I link to for reference are your general news websites like excite, cnn, etc, while others are from health or obesity specific websites.

I also have agreements with companies like Atkins, where I can post all of their recipes on my site, but I have to have a link back to their homepage to go along with each recipe.

Are you implying I should only have outbound links to other health/obesity sites? What about sites like excite that have a health section where I can get articles from?


As far as serps, I'm unfamiliar with that term. Thanks for the help so far

 

Really? I may have read this wrong:

I got it from the web workshop website

 

don't read that workshop site anymore , its wrong. if other advice is that bad, i'd avoid it.

 

LOL, thanks!

 

If you are posting up the exact same recipes as Atkins (which I would avoid, I'd make up my own, personally), I'd read up on the nofollow tag for those links back to Atkins. IMHO, of course.

If your site is a weight loss site, I'd recommend primarily linking to similar type sites. I wouldn't link (or exchange links) with a computer site or something. Its off topic and the (assumed) recipcroal link won't help much anyways.

Think unique content. don't use content that already exists online. You are making your life harder this way.

 

I'm actually not posting the exact recipe in text. I give each recipe it's own thread, and title each recipe by it's name. I put an Atkins related disclaimer in text in the body of the new thread, and then attach the recipe as a PDF file.

Weight loss is a part of the site yes, but a lot of the site is geared towards understanding Obesity and it's impact, hense the reason for copying obesity/health related content on the messageboard. My hope was to keep posting new articles every day to get readers to want to keep coming back.

That's part of my problem, is that 95% of the content on my messageboard is not unique, it's from articles/studies from other websites with a reference link back to that website. Because it's a newish messageboard, I would think the place would look dead and unappealing to people that cruise by if I didn't post something new every day.

I guess you could consider my site to be a repository of obesity related information. My goal is to make the site a one stop shop for anything obesity related. I get positive reviews from people who see the site who are intrigued by all the information. Currently I'm doing link exhanges with obesity/health related blogs with good page ranking to try to boost my popularity and get the word out.

Eventually I'm going to be paying someone to boost my rankings on the search engines and optimize my homepage. Until then I have to get by "marketing" in other ways.

 

I've got a message board that has been on a domain for a year (previously on subdomains and freehosts), that is relitivly big (2000 members, 200,000 posts), which is PR4. Just get the forum popular and the links will begin to come in

 

As lorien has said, "Page Rank leakage" or "Page Rank bleed" is a total myth - ignore any references you find to it. "Page Rank" is a measure of incoming links to a specific page. It is not a measure of outgoing links. A page can "pass" some PR to ("vote for") another page but its own PR is not diminished by doing this, any more than when you vote for a political candidate your power to vote in the next election is diminished.

Yeah... from this one: ww[dot]webworkshop[dot]net. That article is as old as the hills, the author is even older, and the article was wrong even when it was new.

It is and avoiding it is good advice.

 

u will loose your PR due to outbounds and i saw this in many cases.just remove all outbound then your site will move up search resullts and better PR when updated.

 

That is total unmitigated hogwash. It is completely false.

 

What sort of links did you remove seo-mumbai? If you linked to some crap sites for a while and then removed the links your rankings would have gone up. This isn't due to pagerank bleeding its just because you improved your site.

 

More links on the page will pass less PR to those links, but the page itself will have the same PR regardless.

It's not about PR anyways, it's about relevancy. That's what you should focus on. Do you think your visitors - reading the page because they're interested in the content - would find the link you're posting useful to them? If the page is about elderly healthcare and you're posting a link to a gaming site.... that's not relevant. It'll cost you rankings (probably) and won't be of much use to the gaming site other than for PR (which is why PR isn't a good indicator of anything).

 

I gotcha. The only thing my links do is just give credit back to the website where I got the information, but those websites are either news or health related websites.

Would I be better off if I stopped posting obesity related articles (with outbound link for credit) say from Excite and started only doing it with health specific websites and databases?

 

I don't know about your site specifically but in general I would say that if it's a health related site and you have articles about obesity, those would be relevant links.

 

Outbound links aren't bad at all, but it IS an opportunity cost that must be taken account for.

When you link to another site, that could have been a link or "vote" for another page on YOUR OWN site. So instead of passing the rank back to your own pages, it goes to another site.

In my opinion, links to your own site are weighed differently (internal links) so outbound links aren't a life threatening thing at all. Just don't get carried away with them, and yes - make sure they're relevant or you will suffer from it in the SERPS.

 

actually concept of outbound links are to give your site visitors more info about present content there are intrested.even if your site hase very good content at 1 or other time visitor will leave your site, so if u dont have outbound links then will again go to search engine from where they came, it is not cleaver think to send visitors back to search engine even some of search engines are payed this days.
so giving outbound links r good as proff site and it shows u r conf about yourself and content.
so never ever forcefully give outbound link to sites which u dont like your visitors to redirect.

now commimg to number of out bound links from your site.if u give lot of outbound liks every link share your present PR , so if u give only 1 or 2 there weightage will be more.

now finally dont give any outbound link and make all internal links pointing to your site itself with good anchor text as minstrel said your PR only matters, how many revelant sites pointing to u.so after u remove all outbound links u will find very small increase in your site position and even PR increase in update

AS mad4 said there is no chance of errors,google PR and search engine positions are not manuall they are done my robots so they will measure each and every thing even small margin of error will drop your position.say with huge outbound links your site is on 11th position remove all outboundlinks that as human u felt as revelant, so now if your site come to 10th place also u know what is differance between 11 and 10 or if u r in some seo contest that time each and every thing counts .PLz try this once for me and if any other comp site is very near to u then your site will come up , kindly test this and tell us result.once if u increase your search position your traffic and rep of site improves, which leads to more inbound links as your backlinks increase your google PR will also increase.It i not very big thing but still u can see result.

 

No. You are completely, totally, utterly wrong about this. Not even close to correct.