I know Pagerank has been covered a million times, and I'm sorry to bring it up again, but please hear me out as this isn't another "whens the next PR update" thread. I was always under the impression that the more outgoing links a webpage (with PR) had, the more "link-juice" it would release, thus finding it harder to rettain its PR. For example, if both website X and website Y had PR5, but X had 5 outgoing links and Y had 20, website X would be more likely to keep its PR5 ranking (by not releasing too much link-juice). Then in the shower today (when I was thinking of ways to improve incoming vs outgoing links) I realised I was looking at Pagerank from the perspective of the link "buyer". A person buying a link on a website will want a page with fewer outgoing links because it means that they get more of the "share", but that doesn't necessarily mean that website Y releases more link-juice than website X (in total), it just means that each outgoing link gets less because its shared around. So my question is, does the number of outgoing links directly effect the pagerank of a website, or just the websites it is linking too. Do website X and website Y release the same amount of link-juice in total, or does website Y release more. I hope the above makes sense. Please don't post if you're purely speculating or telling me that "PR is pointless". Thanks for your time
Ah, the wonderful ideas we come up with in the shower. My understanding is that the more external links you have on a page does not directly affect the PR of the page itself, just the websites it links to.
you'r right. The page rank of the page is not directly effected by the number of links on the page, it just dilutes the amount of juice you pass to the pages linked from that page.
I would have to agree, because your PR is determined by the backlinks you have and their pagerank and your traffic, correct?
Yes PR is determined by how many in-links you have, not outbound links. You can cut off the flow of pagerank juice by no-following links, at least according to GooGLe and crew.
Outbound links can affect PR too. If too many outbound links are seen on some website it will lose PR on the next update (officially after 3 months). Also if the outbound links are not relatred with the topic the page can got penalty and lose the PR at all
The outgoing links from a webpage shouldn't affect its PR, unless Google deems it to be spammy. Yes, the same amount of PR juice will be passed, but the outgoing links from website X will be stronger than the links from website Y, because there is less to be divided.
PR leak is well know, more outgoing links more the PR leak. A page without any outgoing link candidates for better PR provided other stuffs are in place.
I personally think that outbound links do no eat up the site's own PR. PR of the page will not decrease: if a page links to more pages, the only thing that decreases is the PR juice that each of the out bound link gets. Outbound links has no effect of the page own PR. But if the out bound links are actually paid links, then Google may manually reduce the PR
I think that more than 20 links (including internal links) on a page can decrease the PR and SERPs of that page.
Why should you take care about PR, Last year all my website got PR3 and had only few visitors in a day. Finally they dropped to PR 0 but the visitors increased together with backlinks. Do not take care about it..
I think that in this case the buying and selling of links will be more of a concern than the juice stuff, i.e. if you're 'concerned' with PageRank. Big 'G' has come out and said that they don't like this activity. Just look at the current state of bidding directories. A simple equation if you want to play nice with Google: Selling Links == AdSense Buying Links == AdWords John
Great post. something different to think. I think here the PR that passes from your site will not fluctuate depending on the number of outgoing links. what will be affected by number of outgoing links is the amount of link juice passed to the receiving sites.
Then what will happen with PR of sites like delicious.com ? Every page of these site is full of outgoing links. Still delicious has a very high PR of 8
Bad news for blogs then! Even if outgoing links do effect a page's rank, I really hope it doesn't include internal links ---------------- --------------- Oh yes I should of mentioned in my opening post, I know selling/buying links is frowned upon and it is a good way to lose your PR. This is just a theoretical thread So it seems the general consensus is outgoing links don't effect the PR, although some believe they do. I'd be very interested in seeing some sources if people have them! It seems most of our knowledge (well mine anyway) is based on forum posts like this one, but the original sources are long lost in the depths of the world wide web!
My knowledge is not coming from the forum posts. I experienced that more links including the internal links effect PR negatively. Mine is not a belief. However, I don't want to share here which of my sites lost PR because of having around 100 links. Almost all of these links were internal links and most of them were created by a stupid tagging script. I didn't sell any link on these sites. You may also think in this way: If you gain from a high PR inbound link and if that page doesn't lose anything, there should be too many high PR sites. PR allocations are not unlimited. Because Google has to show only 10 sites on each result page. What can you do if you were Google? Of course link popularity is not the whole story but it is the main part of PR and SERPs calculations.