i have a few different list of links in my link section for eg one page i give people links to about 20 or so games company where they can buy from. another has a small list of forums people can join eg, another list of places that i shop at.i do not have any reciprocal links with any of them and only included them cos i thought it would be handy for my readers. now can i leave the links or should i take it all off because all these external links would not help in my pr? i would include my site url to clarify but i think i can't post live link yet. how many external links can you have in a page before it's bad for you. thank you for help
Do not have more than 100 links on one page. I like under 50. If you make page with external links name it other resources or some other name not links. Do not link to the page from every page on your site so you do not loose much page rank. I would link to it from a page inside your site not home page.
Yes those links drain PR, when you link out you lose some of your juice. Does that matter to you ... not to me. If it does, just nofollow the links even though doing this is using them for the exact opposite reason the nofollow tag was designed for. What you are doing is organizing a collection of useful, relevant links for your users. This is exactly what the web is designed for and hats off to your efforts. Many people will say that your external links don't count as much as the ones pointing to your site. I'm not quite as sure about this as a sure fire way to get deindexed is to start linking to some bad neighborhoods. I would wager (though have never tested) that your external links will help out considerably with your SERPs.
oh dear but my link is a navigation text link on every page i fact it appears twice on each page top and bottom. should i just use robots.txt on all theses pages?
I would keep external links on your site between 20 and 25 to a page. Don't do any site wide links and you can use a "nofollow" attribute to negate any PR loss that the links might cause. If they are not reciprocal then using "nofollow" is a good choice.
PR's the little green bar that's all the rage. SERPs are what bring you visitors and sales. SERPs = How well your show up in the search results
What you do is add an attribute like this rel="nofollow" to the links on the page. Using robots.txt is good for blocking spiders from going into certain folders on your site. You only want to tell them not to crawl those links pointing to those other sites.
If you dont have any obligation or a fair play BL exchange with a website, the link for that website should be with rel"nofollow" attribute. Why to affect your PR ? especially for index!
If isnt a paid link, sponsored link or reciprocical with another one with the same PR! is a nonsense!
but using robot.txt is easier isn;t it, these pages do not have much information just a line or two lke this is a good place to get cheap supplies etc. these pages are completely useless to me so why not use robots.txt and cut these pages off from being indexed instead of using no follow for 40 or 50 links which is more work.