How much do outgoing links hurt your site?

No. Linking to another page does not cause your page to lose PR. That's not what "passing PR" means.

 

I very much doubt that. As one of my sites for which I built up a lot of quality backlinks did not improve its PR compared to other sites of mine, and the only difference was it had a lot of outbound links compared to the other.

I feel it affects PR to some extent. Even if it does not make it lose, it surely affects it possibility to increase PR.

Thats my initial findings,

Abhilash

 

I guess it does hurt if the outbound link is your competitors..

 

Here's an example. Nearly my entire site has a PR of 3, while my exit link page has a PR of 4 (http://www.mealex.com/goaway.html)

 

I think the problem with the "outbound links kill p.r." theory is explaining directories - they all seem to do very well P.R.-wise and that's basically all they are.

 

Maybe not everyone understands the mathematical idea of PR system.
First of all there is one big difference between the real PR and that 0-10 scale that Google shows. Many webmasters consider that that 0-10 is a logarithmic scale of real PR.

In the math theory that was described by Brinn and Page in '97, every page that appears in Internet, increases the total PR of all pages in the Internet by max 1. That means that the total PR of Internet is not greater then total number of pages in it.

Now what happends when you give some outbound link from your page. You give to all pages that you linked to 0.85 of your pagerank (nobody seems to know if that is really 0.85 now, but we can surely say that it is close to that. 1-0.85=0.15 was a statistically proven number of how often a users stops surfing and opens some bookmarks. and I think Google stays near it). So, back to PR. When pages that you link to gain that 0.85 of your PR, the total PR of all the rest pages in Internet should decrease by the same ammount. And you belong to these "all the rest pages". So, your PR will also decrease. Yes the number of pages in the Internet is huge and you should think that you will not even feel that decrease. BUT. There is one big BUT.

Internet is not a homogeneous scope of pages. Pages are always grouped in some site and sites are grouped by some themes. That means that sites with same theme are much more interlinked them sites with different themes. Imagine now a scope of pages that belong to sites with the same theme. It is some multitude that have lots of internal links and several inbound and outbound to other groups of resources. This multitude of pages has some their total PR, and this multitude is not the whole Internet, it is much and much smaller. And building unreasoned outbound links from your page to some other pages in this multitude can really affect PR of your page.

So, yes. Building outbound links does not take away PR from you directly. But depending on many factors, you can indirectly loose different ammounts of your PR.

Once I've spent lot of time building some software examples and trying to understand the model. Sometimes it brings unexpected result. Sometimes PR may even increase a little after creating needed outbound link, but it is too rare and too many criteria should draw up that you should better forget about it.

The main my suggestion for not loosing PR even if you have to build outbound links - build as much internal links as possible. The more your page with links has internal links, the less PR will get that outbound page.
That for example, explaing the success of wikipedia. It is perfectly interlinked. Without that perfect links building, wiki would not get such success even with their huge content base.


PM me if any questions, because I rarely take a look into SEO forum

Have fun.

 

Thanks but I doubt that will happen.

All this has been posted before ad nauseum and none of it alters the fact that in the real world outgoing links do not decrease the PR of the page containing those outgoing links.

In all the debates I have had about this and all the times I have challenged anyone to show me concrete evidence (not theory) of a page that has suffered as a result of adding outgoing links (leaving aside bad neighborhoods and FFAs and link farms), no one has EVER come through with that proof.

Period.

 

In a bright day you do not see the stars, but they are

I think it's too hard to proove this fact because of the following:
- it affects the real PR, but you may not even notice the change in 0-10 scale because it does not affect enough to reach the border of the scale
- google updates PR not so often. that's why it does not give us enough chance to experiment
- there are too many additional factors that change the PR that due to rare PR updates it makes impossible to find out anything

Maybe I'm wrong - nobody knows what Google is doing with their PR system - but due to my high math education I've made some investigations and I think outbound links DO affect the total PR of your resource, but mostly you man not even notice it in 0-10 scale.

At least, all my resources I treat as a scope of interlinked pages that share some PR and have some outbound links. And I'm trying to build a model and balance that total PR of my pages so that it will give to outbound links as less PR as possible.

 

if you will provide links for bad or banned site it will have nagetive effect on your site.

 

I think you've proved my point.

See above:

 

as long as the out going links are of good quality it is ok but if you link any link farms or blocked sites it will be bad.

 

I agree wheel.