Hi! I recently acquired a technology site that has a lot of nice PR 3 and PR 4 pages. The site is a couple years old and has a lot of dofollow external links. I am thinking that if I remove and/or nofollow these external links, eventually it will cause my PR to increase -- since I'm currently passing it to all those external links for free. Even if the actual PR number displayed doesn't increase, the "link power" should improve. What do you think, is this generally the way it's supposed to work? Probably a really basic question, I just didn't have enough coffee this morning ;-) Thanks!
Incoming links that are ignored do not affect PR. Incoming links that are not ignored count for PR is the page has PR. Other than that, incoming links have little effect. Reason? You cannot control incoming links. If you concentrate on the other stuff that matters, you can be more successful. That's straight from the mouth of google. No need to waste time taking them down, just build more links that count. Stephen C
thanks for the feedback Stephen I think my post was using ambiguous terminology What I mean by "external links" is there are a lot of dofollow links on my PR 4 page, pointing to other web sites. It sounds like you are talking about links pointing to my page... Thanks!
Probably best to let those be as search engine saw it as part of a contents, if you remove it now it might send a red flag. For future links you might want to do that.
if you were going by the original pagerank algorithm, then yes theoretically you would get some extra PR by removing them. But, google changed the PR system to prevent "pagerank leak" - google wants to encourage webmasters to link out to quality sites, and therefore PR no longer leaks from external links. In fact, iirc Matt Cutts said that linking out to authority was actually a positive indication of trust for your site. So, no don't remove any external links, as long as you're linking out to quality, topically relevant pages. and in terms of rel="nofollow", Google recently changed this to render it useless for any sort of PR shaping - nofollowing a link doesn't preserve the pagerank that would normally go to it, nofollow'd links still suck PR away from your total pool of distributable PR, but the section of PR allocated to a nofollow is simply discarded.
Removing external links from your site WILL increase the amount of PR that gets passed out on the remaining links and recirculated around your site. However, the amount of PR that you will be "saving" is miniscule and likely have absolutely no affect on your toolbar PR even though your "actual" PR (which you can't see) might change by some microscopic amount. And it will likely NOT help your rankings unless you have LOTS of external links on your pages. "nofollowing" the external links will have no affect on the amount of PR that gets passed out on the remaining followed links and recirculated around your site based on how Google now calculates PR. Removing or nofollowing all external links quite frankly a dumb idea IMO. If everyone were so narrow minded as to only link to themselves because they are worried about their own PR which has VERY little affect on your pages' rankings then there would be no such thing as a world wide web. It would be more like a bunch of islands. If some other site is interesting enough for you to want to link to it or provides your users useful information that your site does not provide then you SHOULD reward them by giving them a followed link. The only time you need to use nofollow is if you don't trust or want to vouch for a site that you're linking to (as with blog comments on unmoderated blogs).
don't remove any link if you remove all links so your popularity will down and if your popularity will down so your page rank and traffic will down
Link power will increase because your link ratio will be more. But then those external links will be useless for google. You need not worry about that as those are not your website's links. You may also get a better PR (marginally)...
Thanks, everyone, for all the great feedback. The consensus seems to be: don't make drastic changes to the links. Any PR/link juice gain would be marginal, but any penalties could be significant. So I'm still going to nuke a couple footer links that were clearly sold for linkjuice, but won't make any other changes to the tons of other links (at least for several months). @swerdlow: have you heard anything about Goog's changes to nofollow since July/August last year. All I know (and can find) is the subtle hinting at changes to nofollow, as described in posts like this: http://searchenginewatch.com/3633972 If you have a more recent scoop I am keenly interested - thanks!
Ive read over and over again that you dont need to focus on page rank, and that it comes as a natural progression of running a quality web site.
I have only ever seen any benefit of nofollowing on internal links. Doing this will let you control the the flow of PR to your inner pages.