I thought there was not such thing as PR leak but now more and more people seem to take it into consideration. Eg "I better stick nofollow on all the links because my PR will leak out".... WTF? So does PR leak exist or not? I think its just one big myth.
It is a myth. People just don't want to give link credit for linking out; I think thats the big motivator.
If you have many out going links from page it will also decrise your PR. and thats why people use nofollow to avoid such loss. i have an example 1st link http://www.cyborginfo.com/Computers/Directories/ 2nd link http://www.cyborginfo.com/Computers/Internet/ both links are linked same way on my site but as 1st URL has more outbound URLs its PR is less compared to second.
Thats what I've been trying to say now for a few weeks, but many people argue against that. I've got PR between 1 and 3 for a new site right before the PR update. The pages with the most outgoing links (all internal) have lower PR. I've got INTERNAL pages with higher PR than myh main page, those internal pages were "under construction" pages with no content nor links except back to the homepage. At any rate, from what I've gathered it's like this: You can pass 85% of your PR to outgoing links (either your own site or to others). But (whats being argued) is that it actually affects your own PR as well as the amount you can pass. In forums for example, page rank drain is referred to passing PR to your members profiles, memberlists, and other useless stuff. Trying to not pass PR when you've got something like a directory or reciprocals is dumb and dishonest though, but some folks do it anyway.
as such PR is not major factor. there is lack of good ranking method for a web page and Page Rank has got unnesessory importance. i totally agree with Shannon
Well I agree with you there, pagerank seems to have little (if not zero) relation to serps. But, I do believe it gets you indexed deeper and more often, and probable has more benefits.
I had exactly the same result on one of my directories even though the number of outgoing links was the same. I think it nothing to do with PR leaking. Its the way google sees your page. For example how high the link is on the page. There must be something in google's algo that gives Internet category more PR than Directory cat. on the first place. I will actually do some testing in a bit myself.
Whats a PR leak? I know what pagerank is, but whats a pr leak? Im guessing you dont mean a leak about how pagerank works...
This goes back to the paper the Google guys origiinally did while at Stanford where they discussed a ranking algorithm. It is online. At one time people designed sites attempting to funnel pagerank to certain pages on their site. Shannon
No. It will not decrease your PR. People use nofollow in the mistaken belief that it does but they're wrong. PR leak is a myth. Forget about it. Spend your time worrying about things that actually matter.
How could it not be decreasing it? If you have for example 2 links on a page, 1 link going external and the other going to another page on your site, you would be sharing the PR with that external link. It may not decrease the PR of the page you're on, but it seems like it must be decreasing the overall PR protential of the entire site.
What about if the anchor text you are using on the link-out is of primary relevance to your site? That is more beneficial to your site than the outgoing link would be detrimental (IMHO). Link out to sites of relevance to your topic and of interest to your visitors. Don't link out willy-nilly and stay on topic. And don't worry about PR leak.
No. A site doesn't have PageRank. PageRank applies only to pages. And it does not decrease because you link out.
minstrel is right, there is no page leak. In the latest patent Google has even suggested that if an out going link is to a site that has higher trust then it might benefit your site by helping to reinforce what your topic is (if the linked site is relevant to yours). The link then helps show your relevancy to the topic. There is an exception to the leek rule though. If you are linking to a site that Google considers to be a "Bad Neighborhood" this will affect you in the serps. If you still think the site is relevant and you are not sure how Google will view it you can link to the site without casting a vote for the site by using the nofollow attribute. There was an earlyer post on funneling PR to pages within your site. This still works if you want to go to the effort. Each page has a certain amount of weight, it is distributed among your outgoing links, the more outgoing links on a page, the less weight each vote will have. By funneling more of this vote weight to your important pages this will help it's rank to a small degree. This does not affect the voting pages rank this is only how much weight it has to vote with. For this reason, sites with a higher number of pages have the potential of having a higher page rank. Each page has voting weight therefore the more pages the more weight to go around.
After Rereading cozmogeek's post, he does have a point. Each page has a voting weight, If a page links to two other pages, it will split is vote weight between the two. If one of the links is to another site then half of the pages vote weight is no longer being used to add to the voting pages site. In reality this is seldom the case. normally the site navigation on the page will contain many more links than what you would have in out going links. So most of the pages weight would remain internal. If you have a few pages where the reverse is true this wouldn't create much of an affect on the site. In any case you have not affected the PR of the voting page, you only affect its ability to help other pages on the site. Create another page on the site and you've fixed the problem.
As minstrel stated, there is no PR leak. That is a myth. Google came up with the "no follow" tag to help combat blog spamming. People were posting links to their sites just to get the PR benefit. By using "no follow" it doesn't pass any PR so there is no point to spamming your link to get PR.
What does pagerank mean? The actual green bar? Mostly it means how often you will get spidered/indexed by Google. Personally I think the jury is still out on whether PR leak really exists. So for everyone who says there is no such thing as PR leak: Pretend you have a home page A, with 20 internal links, and 50 outgoing links. Will your pagerank will affect the frequency of spidering (and PR) of all those internal and external links equally? What about if you have home page B, with 20 internal links, and 0 outgoing links? I tend to think Home Page B, with 20 internal and 0 outgoing, would have much stronger internal pagerank.
Let me issue you the same challenge I've been offering for about 3 years now: Show me a page, one page, anywhere, with clear concrete evidence of having its PageRank decreased as a result of outgoing links. I've seen a lot of theoretical arguments (mostly IMO based on a misinterptetation of the original PageRank paper but let's leave that one aside for now) but in all that time I'm still waiting for real-life evidence. It just isn't there.
You state definitively that PR leak does not exist. Saying that something absolutely does NOT exist, simply because there is no proof that it does (in your mind) is ignorant. Answer the question in my post. It's impossible to prove anything absolutely, we don't know Google's exact algo. All other things being equal: To say that a home page with 50 outgoing links will have the same internal pagerank as a site with 0 outgoing links seems ridiculous to me. Take a look at ezinearticles.com. They have 250,000 links to their domain showing in Yahoo. Their homepage is a PR6, yet all pages linked from the homepage are only PR3. Hmm, lots of other sites with less outgoing links have higher PR internal pages.