We are all led to believe that having outbound links sucks 'reputation' out from your site and inbound links sucks 'reputation' into your site. So I pose this very simple question. If the above statement is true then why is it that alot of local Directory sites have high PR when they have far more outbound links than inbound? Most are not even interested in swapping links, they just put your link on theirs!
I am also interested in this and wanted to open a thread with the same question. Someone cares to explain? Thanks.
If you link to "bad neighbourhoods" it can definitely harm your site. after all, you cannot control who links to you, but only YOU are responsible for who you link to yourself.
I think the confusion comes in how people think PR works. Each page with PR has a certain amount of PR to pass onto any page it links to. The PR is not being directly taken away from that page though. PR can be taken away indirectly. Each external link on a page takes a bit of the PR that could instead be going to that page's internal links. That could cause a chain reaction bringing down the PR of all pages on your site. It would likely take a lot of links to cause this though. In the case of those directories, they are content with passing a lot of their PR to external links. All the links on the internal pages keep the PR of crosslinked internal pages low. They keep their high homepage PR based on external links from other sites. They simply do not rely on their internal linking to reuse their PR throughout their website. Hopefully that all made sense.
If you are afraid of your page rank "leaking" through an outbound link, just make that link a "nofollow" link.
This question has been answered not only on SitePoint, but also SEO.com - it's a myth. You're not sucking PageRank, or bleeding it. You're merely passing on value (you don't become any less trusted by recommending a good resource to someone, do you? Why should PageRank work any differently?) is all. MYTH BUSTED
PR leakage asside . . . surely it makes sense to link out to authority sites in your niche . . . reputation by association and all that?
I'm 110% behind that. And if you link don't put a NoFollow on it (unless it is a paid link) or you will be sending mixed signals to Google (something like "I recommend this site but do not trust it").
Agreed. I have a religion-based site, and on my home page I link out to the famous evangelist Billy Graham's website. That outbound link to an "authority" and niche-related website surely is not a negative and is likely to be a positive to the search engines.
i think it only depends on the sites you're linking to. If they have a link back to you it's considered link exchange and that's not too appreciated by Google especially when you have tons of links on your page but if you link to sites that are related, authority sites in your domain it can't harm your site. I've seen a lot of celebrity sites that have dozen outgoing links to other celebrity sites and they rank really really well for great keywords.
I actually do the same thing, I link to an authority site (gnu.org in this case) which is within my niche.
A few months ago I cleared a couple of my sites of all outbound links or down to just 1 or two outbound links. Now the site's inner pages are getting page rank with any linking campaigns. Compared to some of my other sites I can say without a doubt that in my case it works. NOTE: Don't go changing your world based on what worked for me, throw up a couple sites get in bound links from a few places and test the amount of your outbound links to see how your inner pages end up ranking.