Does the number of outgoing links effect SERP

I was wondering if the number of outgoing links effects my SERP, especially Google adsense links and affiliate links?

If they do can someone give me a step by step how to "nofollow" the affiliates and adsense links. I would really appreciate it....Thanks

 

Very good question. I placed 3 random PR7+ gov and ac.uk outbound links on each of my pages. I believe it has improved my ranking. But no more the 3 links.

 

Adsense "link" won't hurt you. It is a good idea to use nofollow on your affiliate links because they steal the juice from your internal linking. Just add rel="nofollow" inside the anchors ex : <a href=blah.com rel=nofollow>. Make sure you include the "" if your document is declared xhtml doctype.

As suggested by johnvixen - 1 or maybe 2 strong on topic links can help.

 

There's been a lot of speculation over this. I believe 2 or 3 high PR+7 outbounds do make the difference. However, don't quote me on that it could simply be Google dancing.

 

Hi there

Thats a great tip, strange how i aint thought of that before lol, i remember once i put a lot of non relevant links on one of my sites, and it dropped like a stone in serps, also pr went down to 0, once i removed the links the pr returned within 48 hours and my serp slowly returned.

Just an experiance i had that may help

Woc

 

Thanks John and Advantage, great information! Not only learned the no follow from Advantage, but I may find some high PR relevant outgoing links.

Does anyone else have any experience with the high PR outgoing links giving a boost in SERP?

 

This myth has been going around since early 03 and it started as, if you link to Google they will in turn rank you higher. None of it's true, and if you want to split hairs.. adding a link to your page means your page passes slightly less weight to your own internal pages that also are linked to from that page.

So by all means link out to relevant documents, but forget doing it to elevate your rankings as there's far better ways that are proven to work.

 

Thanks sweetfunny! I probably won't do the outgoing links to high PR sites due to your personal experience and reputation. You have a nice line of green reps and substantial post count, so I'm considering you a pretty good expert at this.

What's your opinion on the "no follow" suggestion for affiliate links? Does this help SERP, or does it simply mean that I would not pass as much PR juice to my internal pages (links).

 

Putting Nofollow on outgoing affiliate links is a really good idea, however i like to go one step further and mask them completely so they appear to be an internal URL.

 

I have to agree with you. That would be just too easy to manipulate rankings. Just rank to Google and Yahoo on every page!

 

Thanks sweetfunny for the tip. How do you do the masking?

Hey Frankcow, been a few months since I last talked to you. How you doing?

Anyhow, near the top of the 3rd page for my keywords for 5 months work, just trying to get to the 1st page. Still alot better than 550 position after the 1st 3 months. Getting links, submitting articles, some on page SEO seems to be helping, but I just get the feeling that my Florida Bass Fishing (Just received PR2) site is somehow being penalized because my South Florida Bass Lakes (Just received PR3) site was ranking higher for those keywords and it doesn't have nearly the backlinks or on page SEO that the 1st one has.

I just checked today, and the 1st site took over a better position for the 1st time by a couple positions.

The 1st site does have an RSS feed with webpages that I had submitted articles for. This maybe a dupe issue. Should I remove my articles from my site that I submitted (I put a lot of work into some of them) and if I do, how long would it take for a possible dupe penalty to be removed?

Any other ideas why my 1st site would have ranked lower than my other one (it is also only a couple of weeks newer)? Thanks in advance!!